


Left Hook

by elicitillicit



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Time Travel, F/M, Ginny BAMF Weasley tbh
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-09-30
Updated: 2016-06-12
Packaged: 2018-04-24 03:51:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 18
Words: 22,680
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4904485
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elicitillicit/pseuds/elicitillicit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ginny never took Ancient Runes, but she grew up with magic seething in her sinew and coiling in her gut, and so laughter, hard and hysterical, bubbles up in her chest when she sees a precisely cut crescent moon sitting inside a pictogram of a sun.</p><p>The sun marks the hours of the day, but the moon marks the passage of weeks. Months. Years. </p><p>There’s still shouting behind her.</p><p>Ginny doesn’t hesitate.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

_2 May 1998_  

It takes six Death Eaters to force Ginevra Molly Weasley back from Harry Potter’s cold, dead body.

The good news is that Voldemort is dead, too – he lies shrunken and withered on the flagstones of the great hall, two metres away from where she had pumpkin juice and toast every morning she spent at Hogwarts for five and a half years.

The bad news is that Voldemort’s followers are still mostly _very alive_.

Her mother and father are duelling Dolohov and one of the Lestrange brothers. Percy and Bill are covering for Charlie, who is desperately trying to drag himself to safety with one hand and half a leg in bloody _ruins_. She doesn’t need to look to know that George is still crumpled around Fred’s body, unhinged and uncaring. She doesn’t see Luna or Neville. Ron is screaming bloody murder and Ginny whips around for half a second to see a bolt of green strike Hermione in the back before she goes down like bricks falling. 

She’d thought that the battle before Voldemort’s fall had been pitched. The Death Eaters are fighting with renewed fervour now, and she isn’t sure how many of the Order will survive today.

Some of Voldemort’s former henchmen look wildly elated – they are finally rid of the halfblood who had more power, more control, and more _cruelty_ ; they are now the biggest baddies in the room. Others look frightened; they look hunted, and cornered, and Ginny knows that few things fight fiercer than an animal caught in a trap that it isn’t sure it can escape.

Better news is that Ginny no longer _cares_ about things like honour, or goodness, or _rightness_. Her brother is dead and her boyfriend-not-boyfriend is dead and one of her best friends is dead and so many of her other best friends might be dead and _so many people are dead_.

She is _done_ with being part of the side that Stuns.

The saddest thing is that she recognises some of those who come after her. She sidesteps a Crucio from Blaise Zabini and Vanishes a hole straight through his chest. Lisa Turpin is a Ravenclaw a year ahead of her and Ginny knows that she likes to warble Celestina Warbeck oldies out by the lake during sunny days. None of that matters when Ginny hurls a locking spell at her throat and chokes her to death.

She’s hit briefly by a distracted _Imperio_ before she shakes it off and sends a gouging spell at a woman who looks too much like Pansy Parkinson to not be her mother.

Ginny dodges just as many Unforgiveables as she curses, and something in her splinters when she looks straight into Theodore Nott’s hard blue eyes and casts the killing curse before ducking around a pile of rubble and sprinting to the safest place she knows. His sleeves had been pushed up to his elbows as he duelled and she’d seen that he’d not been Marked. He’d snuck back in to fight alongside the people he’d grown up with and shared blood with, just like she had. 

She doesn’t have to watch him fall to know that she’s cast successfully.

Nobody is bothering with quietfoot charms and the thunder of her pursuers (Gregory Goyle? Eddie Carmichael?) is only marginally louder than the beating of her heart, but Ginny knows this castle like she knows the backs of her eyelids. 

She zig-zags up a staircase and banks a hard right into the second-floor girls’ lavatory. Moaning Myrtle is gone, for once; drawn off into the fighting with the rest of the ghosts washing harmlessly and discomfortingly through Death Eaters. 

There’s a clattering outside in the hall, and she can hear Goyle and Carmichael shouting about what they’ll do once they get her. She almost smiles. It’s as if they don’t realise that there’s nothing they can do to her that she fears.

She slashes her wand violently through the air and her _Bombarda_ rains chunks of stone and plaster down, blocking the doorway and buying her minutes.

Ginny inhales a breath smoky with dust and chokes out a rasp. A hiss. A song hidden on the tip of her tongue and slithering around the edges of her consciousness.

A sink slides out of place, and Ginny doesn’t hesitate before she leaps into the opening it reveals and skids down the slide. There isn’t time to seal the gaping entrance – she’s moving fast, _too fast_ – and she hears an explosion as they blast through her makeshift blockage and stumble into Myrtle’s bathroom.

She’s got a head start, though, and she’s already three-quarters of the way across the Basilisk’s chamber before the first curse flies over her shoulder.

Salazar Slytherin is dead. The last of his line is dead. But Tom Riddle was once a boy who lived in Ginny’s bones like a cancer, and so this is now _her_ Chamber. _Her_ Chamber of Secrets.

_Enemies of the Heir, beware._

Ginny flicks her wand through the air again, and the rank, green water lapping sluggishly at the stone path beneath her feet pulls away from gravity and sweeps towards the intruders. 

There is a gurgle and a scream. The Death Eaters fall back, but she isn’t stupid enough to think that a little tsunami is enough to stop them. She has magic, yes, but they do, too.

She keeps on running, her footfalls ringing like a familiar beat through the hallowed resting place of Slytherin’s monster.

She doesn’t know what it is that propels her towards the shadowed nook between the feet of the giant statue of Slytherin, but she doesn’t flinch when a wooden door flickers into sight once she’s past an invisible threshold.

Ginny feels the magic trickle through her system and recognise her ancestry. _Pure-blood_ , the Chamber murmurs with approval. Once, blood-traitor Ginny would have felt sick, but today all of her is invested in _staying alive_ so she welcomes the distinction with open arms.

Ginny doesn’t stop for a cordial _Alohamora_. Instead, she throws the greater part of her strength behind her shoulder and smashes through the door, scything her wand before her to blow the debris out of her face as she tumbles into a small stone room lit with green witchlight.

There’s a pit ringed with runes in the middle of it, and the darkness seems to nip at the air around it.

Ginny never took Ancient Runes, but she grew up with magic seething in her sinew and coiling in her gut, and so laughter, hard and hysterical, bubbles up in her chest when she sees a precisely cut crescent moon sitting inside a pictogram of a sun.

The sun marks the hours of the day, but the moon marks the passage of weeks. Months. Years. 

There’s still shouting behind her.

Ginny doesn’t hesitate.

She cuts a gash open in her left palm (closest to her heart) and smears her blood – her pure-fucking-blood – over the rune for _Time_.

 _Take me back_ , she whispers. _Far back enough to fucking make sure this never fucking happens._

The witchlight flickers.

Ginny clutches her wand tight in her right hand, takes five steps back, and makes a running jump.

She twists onto her back just as momentum carries her over the abyss and shouts a _Bombarda Maxima_ at the ceiling.

The rumble of rocks falling is the last thing she hears before she’s swallowed by the timestream.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The best place to ask me anything is via tumblr. You can find me at elicitillicit.


	2. Chapter 2

_1 July 1942 – 31 August 1942_

Ginny awakens in the stone anteroom with the date inexplicably ringing in the space between her eyeballs and her brain.

She’s lying spread-eagled in the middle of a circle of runes. The dark stain of old blood is brushed across the Time rune, and the acrid smell of hot metal burns its way through her lungs.

Ginny curls her fingers into her palms and stares up at the smooth stone ceiling and thinks  _I am never going home_.

The tears come thick and fast as she lies there, the youngest of seven and the beloved of all. Before Hogwarts, she used to wish for solitude. After her first year, she’d shunned it; she’d buried herself in people and warmth and sunshine and spent hours flying, trying to leave the cold of the Chamber and the clutch of death behind. 

And now she’s here. To ensure that she will never have to see Fred and George separated. To make certain that Ron and Hermione will get a chance to see where they end up. To keep Harry Potter whole and healthy and  _not orphaned_.

 _Harry Potter_. 

She thinks that she might have loved him, but it’s irrelevant, now. Everything she was in the future is irrelevant in the past. She’s been cut adrift, and there isn’t a purpose to being crippled by longing for a time long gone.

Finally, Ginny swipes at her eyes with the torn sleeve of her jumper and pushes herself up to her feet, cataloguing her physical state. She’s filthy and war-stained, but the double handfuls of cuts that she’s managed to collect are fairly shallow. A sharp flash of pain in her belly reminds her that she hasn’t eaten for over twenty hours – or over fifty years – but there isn’t any food around. Ginny points an  _aguamenti_ straight into her mouth, gulping down clean, oddly flat-tasting water and trying to fill herself up on fluid. The day ahead will be long. 

She takes a moment to clean and heal herself before making a slow revolution around the anteroom. The door that she’d crashed through is whole, albeit still a little rickety looking, and the witchlight is slightly brighter, although it’s still a murky shade of green. The entire room is bare save for the runic circle. It’s convenient that there’s a time travel device down in the Chamber right when she’d needed an escape, but it does help to explain how Slytherin might have disappeared all those years ago.

Ginny spends an hour and a half defacing the runes, casually ripping up stone and smudging gouging hexes across swathes of pictograms, just to be safe.

Wherever in time Salazar Slytherin might be, he won’t be coming back this way. 

There’s a heavy scraping outside of the door of the anteroom as Ginny turns to it, and her heart leaps into her mouth.

The basilisk is still alive.

Ginny squares her shoulders and reminds herself that she’s a  _Gryffindor._  

She conjures a blindfold, ties it tight around her head, clutches her wand tightly in her hand, casts a quietfoot charm, and swings the door open as silently as she can before dropping to all fours.

Fifty-six years into the future, it had taken her less than a minute to dash across the Chamber of Secrets. 

Now, it takes her half an hour of blind crawling to reach safety. She hears it moving, sinuous and heavy, as she bravely drags herself across the rough stone and tamps down on her instinctual flinch when her fingers brush against the bones of long-dead prey. But the primeval magic of the Chamber is at work; she is a pure-blood, and so the basilisk allows her to leave its halls unmolested. 

When she emerges into the girls’ bathroom, shaking and starved for fresh oxygen, it’s empty. The students are all home for the summer, so she only has to contend with the castle ghosts. Thankfully, this bathroom is, as of yet, not haunted.

Ginny makes a mental note to keep it that way. Somewhere in this time is a Ravenclaw muggle-born named Myrtle Warren, and her parents will not bear the tragedy of losing their daughter twice over: firstly to a world that they cannot follow into, and secondly past a divide that no parent should have to witness.

She disillusions herself and meanders down the sunlit hallways of Hogwarts, Hogwarts, Hoggy Warty Hogwarts until she reaches the seventh-floor corridor.

She paces, tightly anxious, thrice in front of the blank wall opposite the portrait of trolls learning ballet.

 _Give me a life_ , she pleads.  _Give me a name. Give me a sword and a shield and a way to survive_.

A door materialises and Ginny slips into the Room of Requirement to find a bundle of identification documents, a letter of acceptance to Hogwarts for attendance in her fifth year, a sturdy canvas backpack, and Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore’s address.

Ginny nods grimly and goes into an attached bathroom for a shower. She then pores over the canvas backpack for half an hour before managing to get an undetectable extension charm to stick. 

There are many benefits to being friends with Hermione Granger, and this is one of them.

Then she heaves a window open, points her wand out into the summer sunshine, and whispers  _Accio Horcrux books_. 

It takes a couple of minutes, but several foul-feeling volumes eventually soar through the window to crash land into the floor.

There are many benefits to eavesdropping on Hermione Granger, her brother, and Harry Potter, and this is one of them.

Ginny asks the Room for a pair of gloves and a cloth bag; she doesn’t want to touch them any more than they want to be touched, and she burns the gloves into ashes after bundling the books up and shoving them into the backpack.

She shovels the rest of her loot into her new bag before tunnelling her way through one of the hidden passages the twins had never realised she’d known about.

When she’s far enough into the wooded outskirts of Hogsmeade, she apparates to Godric’s Hollow. (Sure, she hadn’t been old enough to take the test, but  _all of her older brothers_ could apparate, and so she could, too. Anything is possible if you have enough nerve, a patch of garden out of sight from your home, and essence of dittany on hand.)

“Well met, cousin,” she says when Albus Dumbledore answers the door, his hair as auburn as her own. 

He invites her in for lemon scones and she saves him the trouble of performing invasive legilimancy by opening all the doors in her mind and flooding him with the necessary details. She plonks the books on horcruxes on his dining table and informs him that they need to be destroyed  _post-haste_ , because she’s reasonably certain that Tom Riddle has yet to read them. 

His eyebrows climb higher and higher but he takes her in and takes her false identification documents to the Ministry and has them legitimately and retroactively filed.

She is now Ginevra Jones, a distant Cornish cousin of the Dumbledores.

“You have two months. Learn how to live in this era,” he advises.

There is a twinkle in his eye but Ginny isn’t fooled. This is a Dumbledore almost fifty years younger than the man she knew. Her own Dumbledore was kind, yes, but ruthless. This Dumbledore is colder and harder so than the one she’d known; he has yet to duel Grindlewald, and he has yet to find people in his life to be kind to.

Ginny’s smile is razor sharp in her face. They are both Gryffindors to the core; she understands what  _for the greater good_ means. It means the vindicated light in his eyes when he saw Tom Riddle’s final, grotesque incarnation in the depths of her memories. It means that years upon years of careful misdirection and sabotage have to be planned. It means that she is now Albus Dumbledore’s sword to be honed and sharpened and swung at Tom Riddle’s still-mortal neck.

Ginny has been used before. The difference, she notes, is in the  _choice_.

By August 31st, Ginny’s got a hemline fit for the forties, a reasonably effective hot-roller-hair-curling charm, and her own wand, glossy and savage from war, clenched in her hand.

She’s ready to change the future.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The best place to ask me anything is via tumblr. You can find me at elicitillicit.


	3. Chapter 3

_1 September 1942_

As far as first days back at school go, Ginny reckons that she’s been pretty productive.

As Dumbledore’s ward, she doesn’t have to take the train up to Scotland with the rest of the school from King’s Cross. He Floos them to his office, reminds her that Headmaster Dippet would like a word before the rest of the students arrive, and then turns her out into the school with the suggestion that she fill the intervening hours by visiting the gameskeeper’s yard, since he’s probably out doing a perimeter check around the Forbidden Forest.

Ginny laughs and spends a sweaty twenty minutes corralling three of the gameskeeper’s most excitable roosters into a cage that she’s conjured out of a blade of grass.

The first two roosters need nothing more intense than a summoning charm, but that last rooster takes up fifteen minutes  _alone_ as she chases after it, brandishing her wand and swearing good-naturedly at its tailfeathers. Once, she’d killed their kin (their great-great-great-grandchicks?) in order to ensure the basilisk’s safety. She’s fully aware that she’s essentially killing them again, but at least this would be for a  _purpose._

When she finally manages to hit it with a summoning charm, she closes the cage door after it and jangles the whole thing gently. The roosters squawk angrily, and she allows herself a grin. 

“How about a nice, noble death?”

The roosters do not look impressed. Ginny doesn’t give a damn.

She skirts back to the Chamber’s bathroom and cheerfully ushers the indignant birds down the slimy pipe. She lingers by the open entrance long enough to hear a chorus of muffled crows, followed by a muted  _crash_.

Something dark and ugly had been squatting on her heart since her first year at Hogwarts, and she feels it squirm and dissipate.

The road is long, but she considers this to be a pretty significant milestone.

Ginny vanishes the cage, slides the sink back into place, and devotes the next hour to happily scouring the carved snake off the tap that never worked. 

When all that is left is a battered, useless tap, Ginny cleans herself up, re-applies the hot-roller-hair-curling charm, and skips out of the bathroom to Headmaster Dippet’s office.

She reckons that she’s doing a pretty good job of screwing with Voldemort’s resources. Ginny feels optimistic already, and she’s certain that nothing in the world could fuck with her mood now that she’s managed to get the basilisk killed.

Obviously, she’s wrong. 

Ten minutes with Headmaster Dippet and Ginny is already longing for the mindless, inane chatter of the Gryffindor girls’ dormitories during and around Valentine’s Day. Dippet is fussy and suspicious of how Dumbledore has, without warning or preamble, produced a third cousin out of nowhere, but he isn’t clever enough to ask the right questions and he isn’t powerful enough to conduct legilimency on her. So, she’s forced to smile and go round and round in circles as he asks borderline  _offensive_ questions about whether she’s  _pureblood_ or  _halfblood_ or merely an adopted Muggleborn ward.

Ginny wants to hurl Dippet into the future and demand that he go camping with Hermione Granger during the height of the Second Wizarding War.

Eventually, she gets tired of trying to describe the Cornish village that she ostensibly hails from and jabs a finger at the Sorting Hat, which has been twitching excitedly on top of a cabinet. “I’m sorry to interrupt our interview, Headmaster, but cousin Albus has told me  _so much_ about the Sorting and I admit that I’m rather impatient to learn which House I’ll be sorted into.” 

_I’m just impatient. You’re useless and I want to go. Do something. Anything. Kill another basilisk. Whatever._

Dippet blinks and breaks into a distracted grin. “Of course, my dear girl.” He whips around to snag the hat and Ginny takes the opportunity to roll her eyes.  _Merlin_.

The Sorting Hat quits wriggling as he scoops it up. “You look like you might be a Hufflepuff,” Dippet guesses. “Hardy and so very bright.” 

Ginny smiles thinly.  _Better be Gryffindor_ , she thinks darkly, and closes her eyes just as he sits the Hat lightly on top of her head.

The last time she was under the Sorting Hat, she was barely eleven. She was fearless and deathless and invincible. She was certain that she’d be a Gryffindor simply because her entire family had been in Gryffindor, and it was incomprehensible to her, to be put anywhere else but the house of the brave and the bold.

Ginny still considers herself a Gryffindor, but for very different reasons from those that had placed her in that house in the first place.

 **Ah** , the Hat muses.  **You’ve done this already. I don’t suppose I can interest you in a song whilst I decide whether to keep you or change you?**

Something cold seizes in Ginny’s chest.

_Change me?_

The Hat delivers the mental equivalent of a shrug as she feels it rifle through a couple more of her memories.  **You’re doing anything to achieve your ends, littlest Weasley. You’re ignoring the timestream, you’re bashing through the concept of time as a loop, and you’re not averse to playing God with a lot of people’s existences. I’d consider that a Slytherin trait.**

Ginny clenches her fists and considers being sorted into the dungeons – away from the sky, trapped underground with  _Tom Riddle_. 

 _I’ve already shared a mind with him. I will not share further living space._ She’s adamant, and the Hat rams unsuccessfully against a brick wall.

 **But Slytherin will help you on your way to greatness** , the Hat complains.

Ginny swallows hard and unclenches her hands, smoothing out her skirt.  _I don’t want greatness,_ she informs the Sorting Hat.  _I want things to be made right._

She thinks of her brothers playing chess on lazy summer evenings and of her home burning to the ground. She thinks of Voldemort, splayed brokenly on the ground and whispering murder into her eleven year old ears. She thinks of Snape and his blatant favouritism, Harry and the way rules never seemed to apply to him, and the endemic corruption in the Ministry.

 _I want justice_ , she whispers, and she feels the words drop into the pool that is her soul. 

The Hat throws its non-existent hands up in a gesture of defeat. “ **GRYFFINDOR IT IS!** ”

Another weight lifts off her chest as Dippet removes the Hat from her head.

He scratches his nose and appraises her for a bit as she stares back at him steadily. “That took  _quite_ a while,” he murmurs peevishly.

Ginny lifts a shoulder. “Many people possess traits traditionally valued by different houses. Perhaps it’s unfair to ask them to separate things like bravery from shrewdness.”

Dippet frowns, but she’s already standing. A clock on the mantelpiece chimes the time, and she knows that the Welcome Feast is about to begin. He glances over at it and huffs, tucking the Hat under his arm. “We’d best get going, then, Miss Jones. Do make your way to the Gryffindor table immediately; the female prefect in your year is named Minerva McGonagall. You may direct any further queries about Hogwarts to her.”

Ginny’s heart leaps into her throat before settling back down and going at double time. “Minerva McGonagall, you said?”

Dippet nods. “Tall, black-haired, very pronounced Scottish brogue. She also plays  _Quidditch._ ” Here, he sniffs, clearly pronouncing his opinion on witches who sit astride brooms and play contact sports. Ginny’s estimation of him plummets another couple of points, but then she reminds herself that this is the Forties and feminism isn’t exactly a thing in the Wizarding world.

Still. He’s a  _prick_.

Dippet is still talking. “Gryffindor shares a lot of periods with Slytherin as well; if you run into any academic obstacles, you should seek Tom Riddle out. He’s in your year, and a Slytherin; very bright boy, extremely helpful. You tell him that I sent you.”

Ginny swears that the torches in the brackets flicker at the mention of Tom Riddle’s name.

“I’ll keep that in mind, Headmaster,” she says agreeably, and shrinks a little into his shadow as he leads the way into the Great Hall to facilitate her slipping away with the least amount of notice as possible.

The Great Hall spills out, splendid and breath taking, in front of her as she sidles around the edge to fit herself into a seat at the fast-filling Gryffindor table. 

She knows that she will eventually have to make Tom Riddle’s acquaintance. She just doesn’t want to attract his attention now – not when she’s back in the Hall that she’d last left bathed in blood. She wants to soak in the innocence of being back at school, and the murdering dark lord isn’t a murdering dark lord  _yet_.

Ginny locates McGonagall without any trouble and slides in beside her. The other witch has yet to notice; she’s in the throes of an increasingly heated conversation about Quidditch with three other boys who look like they eat Hippogriffs for breakfast on a daily basis. 

No matter. There’s lots of time to get acquainted with her favourite professor.

Ginny tilts her head up to the ceiling and lets her eyes adjust to the dance of stars overhead until she feels slightly uncomfortable. She rolls her shoulders, spares her surroundings another cursory glance, and freezes when her eyes reach the Slytherin table.

She gives herself credit for not passing out or crying or fucking leaping up onto the table and shouting  _Avada Kedavra_.

It’s not every day that your recurring nightmare takes on human flesh and is studying you with a sort of concentrated curiosity. She’s suddenly very aware of how the bright auburn of her hair stands out against the black of her robes and the brunettes and blondes around her.

She should have dyed it brown, or something. Red says  _uncommon_. Red says  _look at me_. Red says  _danger_. 

And Tom Riddle is danger. 

 


	4. Chapter 4

_2 September 1942 – 6 September 1942_

The past is clearly different from the future.

Ginny spends her entire first week skirting around the sidelines, watching the way the world turns and internalising the way people here interact. (There’s a lot less swearing, she observes, and makes a mental note to tone it down – not an easy feat for someone who’d grown up with Ron Weasley.)  

But, apart from the absence of curry lunch Wednesdays and some subtle sexism, several things leap out at Ginny like a doxy to a face.

The first is that Hogwarts in the 1940s is a lot more  _crowded_  than Hogwarts in the 1990s. In her own time, there had been three girls in her year in Gryffindor, and thirty people in  _total_  in her entire Hogwarts class. Currently, there are ten girls in the fifth-year Gryffindor girls’ dormitory, and she’s told that there are about fifty to sixty people in her class.

And that’s a constant number across all the academic years.

Suddenly, the abundance of empty classrooms in the 1990s make a lot more sense.

She’d been aware that the first wizarding war had decimated Britain’s magical population, but she hadn’t realised exactly by how much until now.

The second is that every student –  _legit, every student,_  barring the most oblivious Ravenclaws – is fascinated by Tom Riddle. To be completely honest, she’s a bit thrown by how prolific he is. He isn’t popular the way that she was popular – how she drew people to her with bold red grins and golden afternoons. He isn’t popular the way that Draco Malfoy was popular; he doesn’t have enough money to splash out on gifts and beautifully tailored robes, for one.

He reminds her of Harry – all quiet charisma and thoughtful gravity.

The thought makes her squirm uncomfortably, and she has to look away quickly when he catches her staring at his profile – his stupidly flawless profile – during potions. She scowls at the coils of steam rising from her cauldron and tries to scrub the wave of his hair and the concentration in his fingers from her retinas. When she next hazards a glance up, he’s already back to stirring his brew of Calming Draught, and she’s doubly certain that the tiny half smile on his face is smugger than before.

Finally – and  _this_ , she notes with something between incredulity and horror – it appears that Minerva McGonagall and Tom Riddle have some sort of  _understanding_.

Because it’s McGonagall who’s bunkered down with Riddle, steadily measuring essence of moonstalk into glass beakers and methodically chopping daisy roots into perfectly equal lengths. This partnership stretches past potions: Ginny sits at the back of the Transfiguration classroom and watches two dark heads bending over a pigeon, McGonagall murmuring pointers while Riddle nods agreeably. She lingers in the workstation across from them during Herbology and eyes the way Riddle does the heavy lifting while McGonagall unflinchingly subdues young venomous tentaculas. Her eyebrows rise high on her forehead when Professor Merrythought calls them both out for an exhibition duel to kick off the academic year and they prelude the customary bows with shared, amused smiles.

House divisions are less  _divisive_  in this time, and her beloved professor – who’d been staunchly suspicious of  _all_  Slytherins in the future – is one half of an extremely efficient working relationship with the eventual Dark Lord.

This explains a  _lot_.

But what  _isn’t_  said – what’s whispered in giggles when the lights are out in Gryffindor tower and excited fifteen-year-old girls are cuddled down in bed – explains even  _more_.

The more things change, the more things stay the same.

Ginny is struck by the easy innocence of these girls; these Fawleys and McKinnons and Prewetts and Weasleys. (She plays connect-the-dots with shy Octavia Weasley’s friendship with brash –  _Slytherin_  – Cedrella Black, and a lump forms in her throat as she fights the compulsion to hug her favourite grandmother hello, hello, hello,  _I miss you_.) They leave the bedcurtains open for hours, gossiping about Charlus Potter’s very public courtship of Dorea Black, Abraxas Malfoy’s flavour of the week, and Augusta Rosier’s meltdown in Charms.

They talk about Riddle’s cheekbones and his summer correspondence – purely academic, it is insisted – with McGonagall.

But Ginny’s a clever girl and she doesn’t need Esther Bones to screech  _MINNY YOU LIKE HIM_  for her to realise that it is only a core of iron quite admirable in a hormonal teenager that stops Minerva  _BAMF_  McGonagall from acting like the idiot lovestruck teenager she is.

She perks up whenever Riddle enters the room. She reddens slightly whenever he leans in close to frown at something on her notes or in her cauldron. She mentions him  _copiously_  in conversations, brushing her long black hair out of her face and beaming, bright and open and  _young_.

Minerva McGonagall’s eyes also narrow when Tom Riddle steps across the Great Hall one morning and pauses to speak with  _Ginny_  instead of her, his gaze sharp with curiosity and his smile more charming than Zeus’s.

(If Minerva is the goddess of wisdom, would that make Ginny the god of war?)

He inclines his head and asks about her morning, her classes, and her opinion on Professor Slughorn’s combover.

She laughs out loud at that last one, and she sees his mouth quirk upwards while his eyes turn hungry.

Mirth dies in her gut and her breakfast turns into ashes in her belly.

_He knows_ , this brilliant,  _brilliant_  boy. He knows that she doesn’t fit. It’s in the way she walks and in the muffled  _mother-fucking-merlin_  she’d let slip when a rogue clabbert had ripped a chunk of her hair from her scalp during Care of Magical Creatures. It’s in the way he’s probably researched the Dumbledore family tree back five generations to check if Percival Dumbledore’s uncles or aunts had indeed spawned any cousins.

Ginny sees the ambition in his spine and the calculation in his eyes and she knows; she  _knows_  that this boy will grow up to be a mass murderer. Their world will be halved by the time she is born, and it will be because of him and his power trip.

But she also sees how he likes the laugh he elicits from her, and how his self-sufficiency bleeds into a desire for acceptance.

He reminds her  _so much_  of Harry.

McGonagall clears her throat loudly and calls him over to ask him about an Arithmancy assignment. He goes, but he also extends an open invitation to a library study group.

She isn’t sure if that’s a threat.

Either way, she’s fucked.

 


	5. Chapter 5

_6 September 1942_

Ginny is two hundred and six per cent certain that she’s going to die.

She’s a hundred and twenty feet up in the air, and Minerva McGonagall is flying more aggressively than all the other males on the pitch – whether they are already on the team, like she is, or trying out, like Ginny is – and she is going to  _knock Ginny off her broom_.

The goal is simple: make it from one end of the pitch to the other while dodging the two existing chasers (McGonagall and a sixth-year named Blishwick) and the other two hopefuls for Gryffindor team’s single open Chaser position.

She can barely hear the shouts of the – all male – spectators in the stands over the wind whistling in her ears, which is good. The only things that exist in Ginny’s universe at the moment are the Quaffle clutched tightly under her arm and the scoring hoops that lie beyond Blishwick.

The current Gryffindor Quidditch Captain, Christian Johansson, is a bored, almost distressingly blonde Scandinavian who doesn’t seem to be taking her seriously enough to actually guard the hoops.

To be fair, though, that’s probably mostly due to his confidence in McGonagall’s flying than his assessment of her skill.

Ginny had never really considered what it meant to be the only girl in a predominantly patriarchal contact sport (as Quidditch is, apparently, in the forties).

McGonagall nudges her broom nearer to her and Ginny dives to avoid losing the Quaffle to a typical smash-and-snatch, but McGonagall continues tailing her, close enough to pull level.

Minerva McGonagall’s position on the team is earned more than twice over. She’s flying because no one can justify not letting her cement Gryffindor’s Quidditch supremacy.

That’s the standard that Ginny has to beat.

Ginny pulls to the right and executes a set of necessarily showy loops in an attempt to buffet McGonagall with tailwind before zipping around a fellow would-be chaser. There’s a shriek from behind her, and Ginny somersaults to the left in time to avoid a clear foul by McGonagall, who’d just tried to smack her off-course with the end of her broom. She’s suddenly abruptly angry; all’s fair in love and Quidditch, and she’s lost count of the times she’s committed fouls against her own teammates during practices. But there’s something snide and petty about McGonagall’s game, and Ginny knows that it has everything to do with that whole thing with Riddle at breakfast.

Which,  _what_ , is  _stupid_.

Eventually, McGonagall will grow up and realise that _chicks before dicks_  is an actual fucking commandment. But now, she’s fifteen, immature, and feels threatened by  _an actual time traveller whose life was ruined by the guy she’s all hot and heavy over_ , and Ginny is  _pissed_ at how ridiculous this all is.

McGonagall shoves into her shoulder, and Ginny uses the momentum to spin away from her and around the other Chaser hopeful.

_This is war._

Ginny can hear the blood pounding in her ears as she weaves around Blishwick, and she’s aware that he and McGonagall are teaming up to pen her in.

But that tactic only works if she’s too slow, and Ginny is never  _slow_.

She jerks her broom up, beginning a climb at a pace that allows for McGonagall and Blishwick to follow, but not enough for them to catch her. When she’s climbed another fifty feet – when each breath of air is solid ice going down her nasal passages – she inverts herself and her broom with a sharp pull and  _plummets_  down over their heads.

The flesh on her face ripples back as she streaks towards the goalposts. Johansson has pulled himself together, but in a different life, Ginny could have played professional Quidditch with the Holyhead Harpies.

He misses her throw entirely, and she sits back on her broom, smug, as he gawks at her.

She glances up at McGonagall, who’s hovering like a vulture, expression stony.

Ginny beams, bright and sincere and  _pure Weasley gold_.

_Your move._

* * *

“Jones – hey,  _Jones_!”

Ginny, who has actually forgotten her cover name, is yanked to a halt by a hard tug on her sleeve.

She’s tired, muddy, and irritated after the remaining hour of drills before the results for the tryouts were announced, and all she wants to do is take a shower and collapse into her bed, but she also really,  _really_  wants to hear what McGonagall has to say.

“Yes?”

“Where did you learn to fly like that?” The words come out in a rush, and McGonagall sounds mostly just curious, but there’s also a trace of admiration that Ginny is gratified to hear.

She shrugs and starts walking again, and the other girl falls into step with her. “Permissive parents and a lot of back yard. You’re not too shabby, yourself. It takes skill to hover on the right side of a foul  _all the damn time_.” She says it sourly, but McGonagall breaks into a grin.

“I’m aware. How do you think I made it onto the team?”

Ginny purses her lips. She can think of a few things that people have probably said about her, and McGonagall laughs when she sees the look on her face. “I was thirteen when I made the house team. Even Gryffindors have limits. There will be some grumbling from the other boys who didn’t make it, but you have all season to prove yourself. At least  _Johansson_  is fair.”

There’s something in her voice that sparks a flare of –  _feminist fury?_  – in the region of Ginny’s chest.

“Is it  _that_  rare for women to be on Quidditch teams?”

The smile that McGonagall flashes her is prim and slightly pained. “Not in Hufflepuff.  _They_  treat everybody  _just the same_.”

“Oh.” They walk on towards Gryffindor tower in silence for a while before Ginny decides to fill it. It’s kind of nice, having an actual conversation with someone. She’d talked to precious few people all week, and McGonagall seems to be in an amicable mood –  _quite_ a change from her competitive gameplay earlier.

“Who was the Chaser before me?”

McGonagall’s snort is as loud as it is unexpected. “Octavia’s and Septimus’s brother. Good old Sexy.”

Ginny gapes. “I’m  _sorry_?”

“Sextus. Sextus Weasley.”

Ginny has never been particularly interested in her ancestry – she knows her grandparents and her immediate aunts, but the knowledge that her great-grandparents have burdened one of their children with the name Sextus is  _mind boggling_.

And  _cruel_.  _Merlin_. And she’d thought that Ginevra was unnecessarily creative after a line of staid English names.

McGonagall chuckles again at her expression. “He  _is_  quite good looking, so at least the name fits the face.” They’ve arrived at a landing, and McGonagall comes to a stop. “I’m going to the Prefect’s bath, so I’ll just see you back at the tower?”

Ginny nods, returns the hesitant smile that McGonagall levels at her, and they separate.

They haven’t spoken about Tom Riddle at all – which is just as well, because she glimpses a sweep of long, white-blonde hair whipping around a corner when she looks over her shoulder.

He’s already set Abraxas Malfoy to watching them. 


	6. Chapter 6

_29 September 1942_

Ginny hums as she ducks around a cluster of chattering second-years and sidesteps a herd of hungry seventh years. It’s been three weeks since Quidditch tryouts, and she’s noticed that she seems to have gained an honour guard, of sorts.

Walden MacNair slithers around on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Thanatos Nott gets Wednesdays and Fridays. Abraxas Malfoy is on duty on Mondays and Saturdays, and they all seem to toss for the privilege of dedicating Sundays to skulking around the Gryffindor portrait hole, should she emerge from her common room to do some flying.

She normally wouldn’t care, but Riddle’s been a little more high-strung than usual for the past week, and it’s beginning to concern her. He’d actually  _snapped_  at McGonagall the other day when she hadn’t chopped her daisy roots into  _perfectly equal_  lengths, and  _snapping_  was something that Tom Riddle just  _didn’t do_.

She also knows that she hadn’t been hallucinating the clench in his fist when she’d breezed past him to get to her table that morning at breakfast.

Ginny’s war reflexes have not dulled despite a couple of months in the fragile, pseudo-peace of this Britain. She suspects that bright lights will always put her on edge, and she will probably never be able to walk through a bedroom in the dark without her wand in her hand and three shield spells wavering in the space between her and the stifling air.

She leans on those reflexes now as she weaves her way through Hogwarts’s corridors after afternoon classes have been let out, glancing at a mirror she’s got hidden in the palm of her hand every so often to check that she hasn’t lost Malfoy.

She hasn’t.

He’s clever and charming, stopping every now and then to chat with friends and acquaintances, but he’s new at espionage, and soft and comfortable. There’s none of the vicious cruelty of Walden MacNair, and none of Thanatos Nott’s sharp inventiveness. Abraxas Malfoy doesn’t hurt others for the sake of pain itself, and is, if she’s read him correctly, loyal first and foremost to himself and his own family.

She can use that.

Ginny meanders down another corner and makes a left up a shadowed stairway. Malfoy hesitates before following her, because even  _he_  isn’t stupid. She’s leading him to a place devoid of witnesses, and his Slytherin sense of self-preservation is  _screaming_. But she’s still just a girl, and Riddle said to  _follow_. So he does.

The corridor ahead of them will, in Ginny’s time, be closed off and used to house a three-headed dog. Now, it’s just a long, draughty stretch, opening up into disused classrooms on either side.

This is as good a place as any, she reckons, and she disillusions herself rapidly before Malfoy tops the stairs and has sight of her again, before casting a notice-me-not on herself just to be thorough.

Then, with her heart pumping in her ears, Ginny nudges a door open with her foot and takes up watch directly opposite it.

Malfoy crests the stairs, pulls up short upon being confronted with an apparently empty corridor, and, predictably, narrows his eyes at the door that hangs slightly ajar.

She’s forced to give him more credit than she did when he raises his wand instead of taking the bait.

“ _Homenum Rev_ -”

“ _Expelliarmus_!” She thunders over him, and his wand flies into her hand before he can finish the spell. “ _Stupefy_  – fuck;  _stupefy! Petrificus totalus!_ ”

Malfoy manages to dodge her first stunner, but she gets him in the shoulder with her next one and follows up with a body-bind just to be sure. His body goes rigid and she catches him with a levitation spell before he can smack his head into the stone floor and give himself a concussion. Then, she floats him into the classroom, props him up against a desk, and locks and wards the door behind her before shedding her concealment spells with a flick of her wand.

She taps Malfoy’s wand against her thigh; his fury is radiating off him in waves.

“ _Incarcerus. Petrificus finite_.”

“You  _filthy_  little-”

“ _Silencio. Mucus vespertilio._ ”

Ginny dispassionately watches Malfoy’s bogeys attack him for a couple of minutes before ending the hex and lifting the silencing spell. “Let’s try this again,” she says conversationally, and takes great pleasure in cataloguing his wheezes of pain and the red gouges on his face. “Why is Riddle interested in me enough to set you lot to wasting time observing me doing my homework instead of doing your own?”

Malfoy looks like he just really wants to spit at her, but reconsiders when she quirks an eyebrow at him and twitches her wand. “I’m not certain,” he says slowly, eyes on his wand, “but he was  _livid_  when he came back to the common room one night last week.”

Ginny smiles thinly. So she’d miscalculated a little. Well. She’d have to live with that. “I take it that I’m the root of his problems?”

Malfoy’s mouth twists unpleasantly, and he meets her eyes, his own dark and appraising. “I don’t know what you are, but you will  _regret_  touching me.”

“ _Legilimens_.”

She’d picked up some Occlumency from Daphne Greengrass in the Room of Requirement, burying kisses with Harry and nightmares of Slytherin’s monster while little Astoria slumbered, curled up in her sister’s lap. Dumbledore had taught her the rudiments of Legilimency in the summer, all the better to read Riddle’s mind with. She hadn’t had the requisite proximity with him to try it out, but here is Abraxas Malfoy, as close as she can get to the Dark Lord himself - at least, for the moment.

She’s a little disappointed when she runs into a spiral of memories of Quidditch and dinner parties, but she’d planned for that possibility, too.

“Your Occlumency isn’t too shabby,” she remarks, using his wand to heal the damage caused by her hex. “Do you get to use it often?”

Malfoy flinches minutely, and her smile widens.

“I can teach you how to be stronger,” she offers, and laughs when he looks away. “Or has someone else already offered to introduce you to power? I can’t promise that what I can show you is more shocking, but I  _will_  spend more time helping you to be faster on your feet than torturing you for imagined slights.”

He sucks in a breath, and Ginny doesn’t need Legilimency to see the cogs whirring in his head. “You come with me to Tom first,” he bargains, “and no one – not even him – will know.”

Ginny nods grimly and casts another non-verbal jinx on him – again, courtesy of a friendship with Hermione Granger – before unbinding him and tossing him his wand. “Betray my trust, Malfoy, and you’ll find that you won’t be as pretty as you currently are.”

She anticipates the jinx that he sends her way and blocks it non-verbally. He has to duck to avoid the ricochet of his knee-reversal hex, which crashes into a closet in the corner, reducing it to splinters.

He gapes at her as she murmurs a  _reparo_  at it.

Ginny notes the exact moment when he decides it’s better for his pride if he just puts his wand away. “I take it that Riddle is expecting to see me at a library study session?”

Malfoy draws himself up to his full height, adjusts his robes, and inclines his head in her direction. “Miss Jones. I will be in touch.”

Ginny smiles again, her teeth bright and sharp in the gloom. “See that you are.”

She leaves the room, but ducks to the side and conceals herself, not wanting Malfoy at her back again, even with her safety-net jinx in play. She peeks back in when he doesn’t make a move to leave to find him waving his wand about, frowning as he tries out small spells and charms. They don’t seem to go to his satisfaction, and he eventually directs a frustrated  _reducto_  at the cabinet that she’d repaired before sweeping out of the room, narrowly missing her nose.

Ginny doesn’t shed her magical invisibility until she’s almost back at Gryffindor tower.

She heads straight for her dormitory and barricades herself in her bed, warding the curtains and pulling a notebook out from under her pillow.

The irony isn’t lost on her as she carefully dips a quill into ink and writes in her best penmanship:  _I have Malfoy._

Her handwriting hovers on the page for a moment before sinking into it.

Ginny waits.

Eventually, Albus Dumbledore’s scrawl bleeds across the parchment:  _Watch your back._

Ginny grins. 


	7. Chapter 7

_2 October 1942_

Ginny knows that Abraxas Malfoy is deliberate in choosing to come up to talk to her right when she’s having a serious discussion about Quidditch tactics with McGonagall in the library, because if he’s anything like Draco, he’s a dipshit who enjoys watching the world burn.

He inclines his head graciously at McGonagall and begs her pardon for interrupting their conversation, and then proceeds to ask Ginny: “Tom has a question about DADA that he’d like to run past you, if that’s alright?”

Nobody misses the way that McGonagall’s lips compress, and the prim, frosty goodbye that she bids them both is both expected and  _completely_ unnecessary.

Ginny turns on him once McGonagall has collected her belongings and swept out, fist clenched so tightly around the strap of her bag that her knuckles are white.

“You’re a  _jackass_ ,” she whispers furiously, wondering if it had been Tom who’d instructed him to ensure that Ginny is alienated and isolated. McGonagall is popular and  _familiar_ to the other girls in her dormitory; being disliked by her is pretty much a social death sentence. Going to boarding school, however magical, pretty much just means that one is trapped in a room with teenage girls, who are arguably the most vicious creatures in the universe.

With the exceptions of the Dark Lord and all his insane followers, of course.

Like Abraxas Malfoy.

Malfoy smirks as she sweeps her quills and a roll of Quidditch diagrams into her own bag and stands, ignoring the arm he offers her. “She doesn’t have a chance with Tom, anyways,” he tells her coolly. “Her jealousy is…  _entertaining_.” 

_And ridiculous_ , Ginny wants to snap, but it wouldn’t make a difference, and he isn’t expecting a reply. So she says nothing, hoists her bag a little higher on her shoulder, and follows him.

He leads them round a couple of bookshelves and deeper into the library, avoiding amorous couples getting handsy in the stacks. Ginny wrinkles her nose and notes the labels on the shelves they pass –  _Alchemy Ph – Sc, Bomoh Rituals – J to M, Voodoo – T to X._

The quiet murmur of studious students and the dry scratch of quills on parchment have completely faded by the time Malfoy comes to a halt at the back of the vast Hogwarts library. Ginny’s never been one for spending a great deal of time in the library, and she’d always kept to the study areas in front, where all the reference books required for classes were in easy reach. But she has a feeling that even Hermione, whose schedule  _revolved_ around the library, has never been  _here_.

The air is dusty, the books feel more hostile, and Malfoy’s broad shoulders are stiff as he stalks over to a blank stretch of wall and raps on it.

The outline of a door shimmers into being.

Ginny’s fingers are shaking and her heart is pumping like  _crazy_ , but she lifts her chin and strides over, closing her hand around the doorknob.

She hesitates.

There’s a light touch on her shoulder, and she looks up into Malfoy’s face. He’s bigger and his features are stronger than his grandson’s, and the only physical similarity they share is the white-blonde Malfoy hair. But Abraxas’s expression is both more vulnerable and grave than she’s ever seen it, and she’s forcefully reminded of Draco, hunted and gaunt, in her fifth year of school.

He was a child. They were all children. They’re  _still_ all children.

She turns back to the door, sets her jaw, and throws it open.

They’re in an empty, windowless classroom, cold with disuse. Tom Riddle is alone, lounging against a wall, practising his transfiguration on the bits of old furniture left behind. He doesn’t bother looking up when they enter, but he  _does_  turn an antelope back into a chair before shooing at Malfoy, clearly dismissing him from the room.

He glances up, eyes narrowed, in the beat of silence that follows. “I’m not going to  _murder_ her, Abraxas. Your chivalry, while adorable, is unfounded. You can stand outside and guard the stacks, if it makes you feel better.”

Abraxas shuffles back slowly, and Riddle raises an eyebrow.

The click of the shutting door half a second later shudders through Ginny’s bones.

It’s hard to see the monster that Voldemort had become at the end in the face of this boy in front of her, pale and dark haired and elegant, but that’s not a comfort. She has to remind herself to breathe through her nose, and forces herself to look him in the eye while occluding her mind.

He smiles and shifts his weight from one foot to the other. “I hope that the walk back here wasn’t too much of a hassle. These used to be study rooms, I believe, before the library was renovated in the seventeenth century. Instead of destroying them, the architects just closed them off and hid the doors with magic. It’s  _fascinating,_  what you can discover with a couple of free periods and a close perusal of  _Hogwarts, A History_ , isn’t it?”

Ginny shrugs. “I discovered that I could make a lap around the Quidditch pitch in a minute and six seconds during my last free period.”

She’d been racing with McGonagall, and the other girl had laughed and taught her how to execute a barely-legal manoeuvre that involved two barrel rolls and a well-padded shoulder. She isn’t sure about the status of their truce now that Riddle’s exhibiting interest in her, but petty schoolgirl rivalries tend to pale in the (handsome) face of pure evil.

Riddle cocks his head to one side and deepens his smile into a smirk. “It’s lovely that you and Minerva get along,” he remarks, and Ginny fights the impulse to roll her eyes.

“Spare me.” She slides her hands into the pockets of her robes and curls her fingers around her wand. “You didn’t have your lackey bring me back here to discuss dormitory politics, and harmless small talk doesn’t exactly work in an empty classroom, far from potential witnesses.”

The benign charm has disappeared from Riddle’s expression by the time Ginny has stopped talking. In its place is cool, dispassionate calculation. She wonders if he is aware that he wears Albus Dumbledore’s most dangerous expression.

Riddle shifts again, and she notes that he’s holding his wand steady. “As you have probably guessed, I spend many of my free periods exploring the castle. In my third year, I discovered a hidden chamber.”

Ginny’s fingertips go numb. Her wand hums in her hand, primed and ready to cast.

“I visited it quite recently, though, and discovered that it had been broken into.” His voice is still light, but there’s a hard, almost  _wild_ gleam in his eyes. “I found several corpses of roosters in it, and they had only partially decayed.”

Malfoy is only metres away, but she’s quite sure that his distaste for torture and cruelty doesn’t extend to backing her up against the leader of his clique.

“I managed to work out that they’d been introduced into the chamber at around the same time that you were introduced to the school,” he continues. His gaze feels like a physical weight against her chest; each intake of breath is a struggle.

He pushes himself away from the wall and levels his wand at her. It takes all of her Gryffindor nerve to resist stepping back. “You’re recorded with the Ministry, but nowhere else. No one has  _ever_ mentioned the Joneses, and those who are wizarding are not related to the Dumbledores. You can’t possibly be muggleborn, because no muggle parents would be able to homeschool a magical child until the age of fifteen. It’s like you didn’t  _exist_ until this year – which sounds ridiculous, I know, but it’s also the most plausible explanation for you –  _Legilimens_.”

She’d been anticipating this, and throws up a spiral of memories the way that Dumbledore had taught her: lots of non-time specific snapshots of dinnertime, Quidditch, and sunlight, melded into a circle without an end. He throws himself against the fabric of each scene, trying to push into her house, catch sight of her teammates, and pan out into her garden, but she’s Ginny-fucking-Weasley, the seventh grandchild of a seventh son, and pretty damn fucking gifted. Riddle bounces back into the spiral well, bruised and thwarted, and skitters away as she closes in on him and kicks him out.

He stumbles, swears, and shoves his way in again.

Ginny is running high on adrenaline but hadn’t expected him to re-cast so quickly, so he catches a glimpse of wandfire and destruction before she barricades that memory away and pushes him out of her head.

Out of breath, they eye each other from across the room.

“That was the Great Hall,” Riddle finally pants, and Ginny feels sick to her stomach.

“ _When_  are you from, Miss Jones?”


	8. Chapter 8

_2 October 1942_

Riddle’s eyes are bright and wild, and he looks so  _certain_  and  _vindicated_ about cracking her secret (because, of course, he’s  _right_ ) that she’s paralysed for a moment before leaping into action. 

She’s in shit anyways, so here goes nothing. 

“ _Obliviate_ ,” she screams, but Riddle ducks and flicks his wand almost lazily, and her own wrenches itself from her grasp and soars towards him. 

Her stomach plummets towards her shoes but she ignores the mounting panic and launches herself at Riddle, barrelling towards him even as her wand is in the air. She puts her shoulder into the tackle, sending them both to the ground. 

 _Wizards rely too much on their wands_ , Tracey Davis had advised a lifetime ago in the Room of Requirement.  _Think of how different the world would have been if the Dark Lord had just thrown baby Harry Potter out of the window._  

Davis had been a half-blood in Slytherin with an  _excellent_ sense of self-preservation - and that had included not being afraid to  _hit_. 

Riddle is much taller and slightly heavier, but he is soft from hours in the library instead of physical exercise, and Ginny is an  _athlete_. 

He doesn’t expect her to drive her knee into his kidneys or fracture his right wrist. Riddle chokes back a grunt and their wands go rolling across the floor. She claps her palms  _hard_ over Riddle’s ears, stunning him briefly, before scrabbling for her wand.

She’s got it jammed into Riddle’s temple and is about to wipe his memory when he closes his left hand tight around her wrist and  _pulls_. 

Her wand jerks in her hand and the spell blasts a divot into the stone by his ear. 

He takes advantage of her momentary loss of balance to flip them over, using his knees to hold her legs down. His right elbow leans painfully into her left arm, and his other hand doesn’t leave her wand arm.

They freeze there for a moment, sweaty and panting, and Ginny feels him through their robes, hard and heavy, against her thigh. 

She should feel dirty, nauseous,  _repulsed_ , but his breath is hot against her skin and she cannot ignore the crackle of his magic pushing against her bones. Tom Riddle is magnetic in all the meanings of the word, and she blames hormones and puberty for the rush of desire that sets her blood on fire when he presses closer. “You’re  _sick_ ,” she whispers unconvincingly, and he smiles, sharp and feral. 

“ _When_  are you  _from_?” he croons, and something in Ginny snaps. 

“Why don’t you look?” she taunts, and points her wand at her forehead. Something flickers red in his eyes and he slides his fingers down over the bones of her wrist to curl around her own. 

 _Legilimens_.

She shows him Voldemort’s body, crumpled and withered on the floor of the Great Hall. He recoils as she focuses on the chalky white of the corpse’s skin and the snakelike features. Voldemort had died with his eyes open, and Riddle flinches at the dull, bloody gleam of his irises. 

 _No_ , he breathes, and shoves against the memory, searching for  _more_. 

She obliges, leading him through the ruined husk of his sanctuary, blurring names and faces and lingering on the charred ruins of the only home that Tom Riddle had known. 

 _You did this_ , she tells him, and his horror is an exact match to her own. 

Riddle wrenches himself from the memory and sits back, pale and shaking. Ginny shakes her arm out, summons his wand to her before he can gather his bearings, points it at his wrist, and mends the fracture before tossing it back to the floor. 

“For the avoidance of doubt,” she says, getting heavily to her feet, “that was you.” 

He gazes up at her, vulnerability and fear obvious on his face, and it suddenly hits her that Tom Riddle is  _fifteen_. 

“What  _happened_?” 

She knows that he isn’t just talking about his appearance. 

“Power corrupts,” she says simply. 

She levels her wand at him again and gets as far as  _Obliv-_ before she finds herself pinned to the wall, his fingers meshing into her own as her wand knocks hollowly against the stones behind her fist.

She struggles briefly, but he’s using his entire body to hold her there, and she gives it up. 

“I won’t kill you if you swear not to wipe my memories,” he promises, and she laughs. 

“What is your word  _worth_?” 

He looks her in the eye, then, and doesn’t even try to break into her mind. “I have never broken any of my oaths.” 

She finds that she believes him, but still, why should she believe the word of a future dark lord? 

“Get Malfoy in here and Vow that you will never harm me or kill me.”

His eyes narrow. “And you will swear that you will never raise a wand against me again.” 

She smiles thinly. Barely five minutes ago she’d winded him without magic. Riddle is nothing if not consistent. “I will swear that I will never wipe your memories.” 

“Or harm or kill me,” he bargains, and Ginny grits her teeth and nods. She’ll relinquish the right to kill Tom Riddle to Albus Dumbledore if it keeps her alive a little longer. 

Riddle releases her warily, collects his wand, and flicks it at the door. It creaks open, and Abraxas Malfoy steps in, cautious and tense. 

“We need you to bond us with an Unbreakable Vow,” Riddle says, as if he goes around making oaths with blood-boiling penalties every other day. 

Malfoy, to his credit, only nods. 

Ginny clasps Riddle’s arm, and Malfoy taps his wand against their skin. 

“Do you, Ginevra, vow never to raise a wand against me, Thomas, to erase my memories, harm me, or kill me?”

“I do,” Ginny swears, and she feels the magic seep into her bloodstream, burrowing into her body. “Do you, Thomas, vow never to harm or kill me, Ginevra, or have me harmed or killed?” 

His lips thin, as if the idea of anyone else hurting her is distasteful to him, but he nods. “I do.”

Their hands are wreathed in fire, and Malfoy taps their hands to end the spell.

Tom’s hand lingers on her arm a touch longer before dropping heavily to his side. His mask is back in place, and he turns away. “We will have a longer, mayhap more  _productive_ chat soon, Miss Jones. You, however, have to be at the Quidditch pitch in twenty minutes, and I’d hate for you to be late.” 

Ginny snags her bag from the floor and takes a step back. “You’re very considerate,” she observes, a little taken aback by the sudden change in his demeanour. 

“I’m very generous,” he replies lazily, and waits for them to leave. 

He has his hands clasped behind his back, and if Ginny squints, she can see the slight tremor in his fingers. She’s taken more out of him than he’s letting on.

Ginny nods and backs away. 

“Abraxas, if you will escort her out?” 

The door slams shut behind them, and she hears the click of lock tumblers sliding into place before she takes a breath.

Malfoy doesn’t say anything until they reach  _Unseelie, K - L_ , and she collapses against a shelf, shivering so hard her teeth chatter. 

He reaches for her elbow but she bats his hand away and closes her eyes, gulping in as much air as possible, trying to clean out her lungs. 

Malfoy keeps his distance, but when she finally looks at him, she catches a glimpse of concern before he shutters it away. “You’re almost decent,” she mourns. “Why are you doing his dirty work?” 

He hesitates before drawing the collar of his robes aside and down, exposing an ugly scar halfway between his collarbones and his heart. “I share a dormitory with him,” he points out, voice low and guarded. “And it’s always wise to go along with the person with the most power, regardless of their origins.” 

For the first time, Ginny wonders if she’d have done any differently if she’d been Draco Malfoy. 

She pushes herself away from the shelf and takes the arm that he instinctively holds out. 

“First thing you need to learn,” she murmurs to him as they exit the library, “is how to punch.” 

His muscles tense under her palm, and Ginny exhales. 


	9. Chapter 9

_3 October 1942_

Albus Dumbledore is, predictably, displeased with the fact that Ginny has sworn an Unbreakable Vow to Tom Riddle. 

“You’re  _certain_ that it doesn’t include  _plotting_?” he demands, surfacing from his second review of her memories of that afternoon. 

(Ginny had hesitated briefly before surrendering them to him, but there hadn’t been a good enough justification for withholding memories that might contribute to the downfall of the evilest dark wizard of all time. She’d just have to live with the embarrassment of being aroused by said wizard whilst rolling around on the floor with him.)

“ _Yes_. He  _still_ doesn’t think that I’m a danger without magic.” 

Dumbledore paces away from his pensieve and sinks into his chair, eyes hard and calculating. “What are the chances of you managing to kill him without magic?” 

Ginny frowns. “I’d probably only have one shot at that. I’d have to separate him from his wand - which wouldn’t be easy. He’s the type of boy who’d  _sleep_ with it tucked down his pants.” 

She sleeps with hers in her hand, shoved under her pillow, but it’s not like he has the excuse of living through a war to explain his paranoia. 

He glances up at her. “Pardon my crudeness, but what if you managed to separate him from those pants?” 

At first, she thinks that she’s misheard him, but the expression on his face confirms his suggestion. 

“There is, I gathered, some attraction between you both,” he continues, and Ginny feels as though she’s falling from her broom. 

The clinical ticking of his desk clock is the only sound in his office for at least a minute and a half. 

She steels herself and raises her chin.

“In his first year at this school, Harry killed a man with his bare hands, and all you did was pat him on the head, award him house points, and mention how fortunate it was that his mother had loved him enough to die for him. You gave him to a family who locked him in a cupboard and treated him like an  _animal_ , just so that you could take advantage of that protection. When I was eleven, not  _one_  of your teachers realised that I was fading slowly away into darkness. You continued to play us like pawns - and we died for you. At seventeen, sixteen, fifteen, twelve - we were soldiers in a war. You raised the boy I loved like a lamb to slaughter.” 

Dumbledore says nothing, and she reads a general’s disregard for foot-soldiers hidden behind his kindly, twinkling blue eyes. 

“I won’t whore myself out to Riddle,” she says flatly, and notes how he doesn’t recoil from her use of the word. “Not even if it means that I have a chance at flipping over and strangling him in his sleep.” 

There’s another silence, long and cold. 

“Very well,” Dumbledore says eventually, steepling his fingers. “Tell me how you think we can use Malfoy.” 

* * *

 

Ginny delays her return to Gryffindor tower until the torches have all been lit in their sconces and dinner is long over.

She’d managed to avoid McGonagall entirely the day before, but she realises that she should have just gotten to her dormitory early, gone to bed early, and risen early if she’d intended to escape dealing with her roommates. 

McGonagall is in the common room doing homework with Esther Bones when she slips through the portrait hole. Ginny debates whether or not to go up to her, say hello, and pretend that the entire scene in the library hadn’t happened, but McGonagall half turns her head towards Bones, catches sight of her, and looks away, shoulders stiff.

Ginny rolls her eyes and continues up the stairs to her dormitory, trying to remember if dating Harry had elicited such ire in any of her schoolmates. To be honest, even  _Romilda Vane_ had been more curious than envious, and she hadn’t cared enough about anyone else for them to be able to hurt her. 

The level of chatter in her dormitory dips briefly when she enters. Ginny resists the urge to kick something, retrieves her pyjamas from the foot of her bed, and stomps over to the adjoining bathroom. 

She doesn’t expect Octavia Weasley to trail after her and lean against a sink, thoughtfully watching her unbraid her hair. Ginny sets her lips and glares into the mirror. What  _now_? 

Octavia clears her throat after couple of moments. “I know that you’re new, but it’s the practice - to preserve good feeling, you understand - to avoid walking out with boys that your roommates have already taken fancies to.”

Ginny tamps down on a bubble of incredulous laughter. “Did she send you in here to talk to me?”

Octavia shrugs her narrow shoulders. “Minny is one of my best friends. I like you, Jones - you’re nice enough, even if you keep to yourself a lot - but I want her to be happy.” 

Ginny’s eyebrows climb. “You do realise that I have no control over what Tom Riddle does or says?”

“I’m quite certain that if you indicated your disinterest, Tom would be gentlemanly enough to leave you be.” 

She laughs, finally, and she’s a little surprised at how hostile it sounds. “I’m not interested in Riddle in the way that you think I am, Weasley.” The memory of his body against hers flashes hot in her mind for a moment before she shoves it aside. “You can tell McGonagall that he’s all hers, if he’ll have her. She can have sex with him on the steps of the Great Hall for all I care.” Ginny ignores her little gasp of horror and leans in close. 

“She can come to me and apologise for being a jealous little grindylow any time she wants. Go ahead and run that message to her like an owl.” 

And then Ginny turns back to the mirror, hiding the furious shake in her fingers by combing her hands through her hair. 

Octavia turns on her heel and marches to the door. Ginny tracks her retreat in the mirror and sees her pause minutely at the frame. 

“I told Minny that she was being unreasonable, you know,” she says coolly. “I also agree with you that it isn’t fair to blame you for someone else’s interest. But it wasn’t necessary to speak to me in that way. I, too, will be waiting for an apology - from you.” 

Ginny watches her great-aunt gently shut the bathroom door. 

She rakes her fingers through her hair again, and feels very, very small. 

 


	10. Chapter 10

_23 October 1942_

Dumbledore insists on an update every time she meets Malfoy, so for three weeks, Ginny’s diary correspondence runs along the following lines: 

 

 _We’re going to be in one of the empty classrooms on the third floor off the charms corridor, so please don’t send any prefects our way._  

_We’re meeting during Riddle’s Arithmancy periods; calm down._

_Malfoy squeaked when I hit him in the face._

_Malfoy broke his thumb because he's stupid._

_I don’t understand how Malfoy is so fit but also so unable to punch properly._

_It’s an objective assessment._

_I can’t believe it took three weeks for him to hit a target with a satisfying thwack._

 

Ginny had learned basic self-defence in the Room of Requirement, with padded floors and mirrors against the wall. She certainly isn’t going to take Malfoy to the Room, so she transfigures a spare cloak into a thin foam floor mat and a pair of shoes into handheld targets and tells him to  _come at me_. 

He does this with great reluctance during their first session, his lips curling at the sheer  _Muggleness_ of  _brawling_ until she shrugs, tosses the targets aside, and charges at him. 

She knocks the breath from his lungs and lands a couple of blows -  _not the face,_ he gasps,  _Merlin,_ please _not the face_ \- before he surrenders and starts taking her more seriously. 

He pins his long blonde hair up in a topknot and strips out of his robes and shirt and Ginny tries not to stare at the shift of his shoulders when he brings his fists up and powers a blow from his shoulders. Harry had been built like a Seeker - light and lithe, and she’d  _loved_  him, but she’d be lying if she said that she doesn’t find Abraxas Malfoy and his rippling muscles attractive.  

It’s true that her type tends to be more  _tall dark and angsty_ , not  _tall blonde and guarded_ , but Malfoy’s stiffly formal, inherited pureblood gentility gives way to snide comments, then to serious focus, and then eventually - after eleven hours in total of sweat and swearing - to something that might resemble an actual  _personality_.

He laughs - not meanly - when she trips over the edge of the foam mat and says a word that her mother would rap her over the knuckles for thinking. He jams an elbow into her neck when they’re sparring -  _by accident_ , Ginny maintains - and flips out and goes into full-blown mother hen mode. She puts her foot down when he tries to carry her bodily to the kitchens for a warm mug of honey lemon. They aren’t even really supposed to be interacting, so hanging out together suddenly might spark gossip in a school that  _thrives_ off it. 

And Riddle would find out and would probably try to torture Malfoy for more information on her, so. That’s a terrible idea. 

But, either way: she begins to  _enjoy_ spending time with him.

She snickers because his grunts of exertion sound funny, and he throws a target at her in jest. She catches it and flings it back at him, murmuring  _finite_ , and he has to duck when it turns back into one of her boots in mid-flight. 

They build up enough of a camaraderie that, when they’re catching their breath after an hour and a half of punching at each other, it isn’t strange that Malfoy turns to her and asks how things are with the girls in her dormitory. 

Ginny shrugs and scrapes her hair back into a ponytail. “I don’t really chat to them much. They tend to follow McGonagall’s lead, and she’s just about cordial, but that’s it.” 

Malfoy smirks. “Jealous?” 

“No thanks to  _you_ ,” she says acidly, and kicks half-heartedly at his shin. Malfoy rolls his eyes and reaches for his wand. 

“No thanks to  _Tom_ ,” he corrects her as he  _scourgifies_ himself of sweat. “He’s been eyeing you like a kneazle looks at a mouse since that day in the library. It’s a wonder that I haven’t been sent on an errand to fetch you to him, yet.” 

Ginny’s been wondering about that, too, but she’s been doing a fantastic job at avoiding being left alone with Riddle - no mean feat, given that she doesn’t actually have any real friends to latch on to - and she prefers not to look gift horses in the mouth. Malfoy shrugs his shirt on, and her eyes are drawn - as they often are - to the scar on his chest. He grimaces and does his buttons up rapidly. 

“I don’t know what you said to him when you were alone, but I’d have a care, if I were you.” He summons their robes to him and tosses hers at her. “He’s dangerous.” 

Ginny sighs and transfigures her sweatpants back into her skirt. “I know  _that_ ,” she mutters, and there’s an awkward pause in the conversation as Malfoy considers how he’s basically a henchman and Ginny hates herself briefly for the burst of heat that rolls over her skin at the thought of Tom Riddle. 

“What are your plans for Halloween?” he asks presently, once the silence has stretched on long enough for the subject of Riddle to be deemed closed. 

“Am I supposed to be making plans? I figured that we’d just do the feast and then go to bed.” In her own time, her mother and father would be partaking in the traditional rites for Samhain, but, like many traditions practised by the old Purebloods, those were dying out - and the Weasleys had never been particularly traditional in the first place. 

Malfoy swishes his wand again, and the foam floor mat turns back into a cloak. “A couple of us head to the lake after the feast to celebrate Samhain properly. Dumbledore doesn’t particularly like it, but Dippet doesn’t really care. You can come, if you’d like.” 

“With you? Wouldn’t that be odd?” 

He folds the cloak up clumsily and thrusts it into her arms. “Not  _with_  me,” he clarifies quickly. “It’s an open invitation - any student who would like to celebrate the festival can come. You can turn up, lay your stone, light the bonfires, walk between them, then go back to your tower. There’s isn’t a social obligation.” 

Ginny hums. “I’ll think about it.” 

Malfoy looks a little relieved as he cracks the classroom door open and checks for passers-by. There are none, of course, because Ginny has arranged it that way, and he relaxes and steps halfway out into the corridor. “Most of us are going down to Hogsmeade tomorrow to get some guises,” he adds. “I just wanted to ask you before the weekend so that you’d have a chance to plan a costume in case you decide to go.” 

There’s something in his voice that makes her swallow hard before she thanks him, offhand, and shoos him off benevolently. 

Malfoy grins, lopsided, and shuts the door quietly behind him.

* * *

That night, Ginny writes: 

 _I think that Abraxas thinks we’re friends_. 

Dumbledore replies: 

**Excellent. I trust in your plans, Ginevra.**

Ginny shuts her diary, shoves it under her pillow, and rolls over onto her back. 

She used to play chess with Ron, who’d patiently taught her strategy and never went easy on her. 

She thinks of decoys and long cons. She thinks of the hard-earned quirk of Abraxas Malfoy’s smile. 

She presses the heels of her palms into her eyes and tells herself that her guilt is irrational until she falls asleep. 

 


	11. Chapter 11

  _24 October 1942_

Quidditch is, as per usual,  _brutal_. 

Their first match is against Slytherin, the week after Halloween, and Johansson has them all up at the crack of dawn running drills and practising near-fouls. McGonagall, Blishwick, and Ginny spend two hours aggressively passing the Quaffle to each other, and Ginny is ready to hurl the ball at Johansson’s stupid Scandinavian skull when he finally calls a halt to the session and calls them all down to the pitch and turns on her and McGonagall. 

“Your flying is  _mediocre_ and has been for the past month,” he informs them coolly, and Ginny winces. “I took you, Jones, because you’re an excellent individual flier. But Chasers work in  _teams_ , and  _this_  team is  _merely competent_. I couldn’t care less about your petty teenage jealousies -  _yes_ , I’ve heard about it, and  _no_ , I’m not getting into it - and I am thankful that there has been an attempt to keep it off the pitch.” 

McGonagall flushes, and Ginny resists the urge to scream in frustration at the absurdity of it all.

Johansson pauses, lifts a blonde eyebrow, and continues. 

“We aren’t going to win anything if you continue working together like two centaurs with different star charts. Deal with your issues,  _now_ , or I will have both of you booted off the team for wasting everyone’s time.” 

This is the most that Ginny has ever heard Johansson say, and from the look on the rest of her teammates’ faces, this is  _rare_. McGonagall looks like she’s unsure as to whether she’s stunned or indignant, and Blishwick glares at Ginny’s shoes pointedly. 

Johansson nods at them in clear dismissal and turns his attention to the rest. 

Ginny takes a tentative step back, and when it becomes clear that Johansson truly doesn’t give a shit, she whirls around and stomps back to the castle, almost too angry to breathe. 

 _Mother-fucking-Riddle_ , she murmurs savagely, and kicks the door to the changing rooms open. It ricochets hard against the wall, and the sound makes her feel slightly better. She knows, objectively, that it’s irrational to blame McGonagall’s infatuation on him, but Merlin be  _damned;_  Quidditch is the  _only thing_ she has here for herself, and she can’t quite believe that he’s tainted even this. 

There’s a sound behind her, and Ginny almost brains McGonagall with her broom when she whips back around. The other girl looks half sheepish, half sour, and entirely uncomfortable as she opens her mouth to say something. 

Ginny throws her broom to the floor and beats her to it. 

“I don’t fucking  _care_ how you feel about Riddle,” she snarls, and McGonagall closes her mouth instantly and recoils. “You can have him if you want - if  _he_  wants - which, by the way, I’m like a hundred and thirty seven per cent sure that he  _doesn’t_ , because he’s a fucking _demon_  - and I just want to fucking  _play_.” 

McGonagall swallows and purses her lips. “You don’t fancy Riddle?” 

Again, Ginny feels the heat of Riddle’s grip around her wrist, but it comes tempered by the cold of the Chamber as he stole into her soul and sucked her dry. 

She settles for sinking down onto a bench and scrubbing at her face with her hands. “Does it matter?” she asks, tiredly, honestly. “Are you going to have me isolated if I decide that I want him to hold my hand in the light of the day and kiss my neck in the dark of the night? Because I thought you were  _better_ than this. I thought, after making it onto an all-boys Quidditch team in a world where no one has heard about feminism, that you’d understand the concept of  _fairness_.” 

It looks like it costs her, but McGonagall shuffles forward hesitantly and perches beside her on the bench. “Octavia said that I was being silly.” She looks determinedly at a patch of air above Ginny’s left ear when she admits: “I know I’ve been ridiculous.” 

No  _shit_ , Ginny thinks, but keeps silent as McGonagall carries on. 

“It’s just - you’re clever, and pretty, and came out of  _nowhere -_ and suddenly he’s asking me questions about you and he’s  _never_ done that - and the way you look at each other is - it’s just -” 

GInny, whose blood had run cold at the mention of Tom Riddle asking questions about  _her_ , cuts McGonagall off when it’s clear that she’s becoming incoherent with embarrassment. 

“I get it,” she says, and winces at how brusque she sounds. “I mean, if you want to restart, I’m fine with that.” 

McGonagall offers her a smile, and the impatience in Ginny’s chest dissipates somewhat. 

“We’ll all be going to the Samhain bonfire next week,” McGonagall says slowly, and Ginny thinks immediately of Abraxas Malfoy and the barely-concealed uncertainty in his own invitation the day before. “Will you come with us to Hogsmeade later to get guises?” 

Ginny unclenches her hands and swipes a palm across her face one last time.  _She’s trying_ , she reminds herself, and looks up at McGonagall. 

“Of course.” 

McGonagall’s answering smile is still slightly brittle, but she nods briskly and picks Ginny’s broom up and hands it to her before grabbing her own. “We’ll be at the common room at two,” she informs her, and smiles again before disappearing into the showers. 

Ginny lets her head drop back against the wall.  _One step at a time_ , she reminds herself, and drags herself to her feet. 

 


	12. Chapter 12

_31 October 1942_

If Tom Riddle were to drag her into a corner of the Forbidden Forest right now and Avada Kedavra her, Ginny could safely say that she’s seen it all in life.

Ginny’s reasonably certain that if Lucius Malfoy ever saw his father knocking back firewhisky dressed like a (very well-preserved) zombie in the light of two roaring bonfires whilst  _I’ve Got A Gal (In Kalamazoo)_ played in the background, he’d probably expire from shame on the spot.

Hallowe’en in the forties counter-intuitively appears to be a lot rowdier than Hallowe’en in the nineties. She’d thought that Hogwarts had been incredibly lax about student supervision in her own time, but  _responsibility_  seems to be a concept that eludes the upper year Gryffindors who are manning the firewhisky kegs beyond the bonfires and blithely handing out alcohol to wide-eyed fifth-year Hufflepuffs. 

She’d arrived at the lake with McGonagall, Octavia Weasley, and Bones an hour before, when people had been slightly more sober and the rituals were just beginning. In the space between cutting her name into a stone to be laid by the bonfires and walking between the flames, however, she’d managed to lose the other girls. Bones had caught sight of Malfoy, squeaked, yanked at her neckline and zipped away. Octavia Weasley had placed her stone and then graciously excused herself when Cedrella Black, who was openly smoking a cigarette that she’d probably bummed from her cousin Alphard, shrieked at her to  _get over here, Tavvy, are you seriously here as a_ weasel _, what-_. 

And then McGonagall had been drawn into a lengthy academic disagreement with a couple of sixth-year Ravenclaw prefects about the effectiveness of the use of runes for divination, and when Ginny found herself staring blankly at Angus McKinnnon’s uneven eyebrows and wondering what it was like to go through life constantly looking surprised, she decided to excuse herself. McGonagall had been so engrossed in the conversation that she’d only hoisted her toga a little higher and flapped an absent hand at her in goodbye. 

Which was how she’d ended up sprawled out on a cool patch of grass a little away from the revelry, with a warming charm thrown up around her and a plastic cup of butterbeer in hand as the party in front of her gets rowdier. 

She’s too lazy to head back to the castle and too tired to join in the dancing, so she leans back on her elbows and lets her mind wander as she watches Esther Bones sidle up to Alistair McLaggen, her mermaid guise riding provocatively low on her chest. 

( _”Should I get the vampire or the wiccan wench costume?” Esther had asked, the week before, and Ginny had answered, in all honesty:_

_“-Both seem equally whorrifying -”_

_And Esther had nodded thoughtfully and turned to another rack of sequinned guises whilst McGonagall descended into a coughing fit._ ) 

The past week has been somewhat surreal; apparently it is now common knowledge that McGonagall and her have put whatever it was between them aside for the purposes of Quidditch, and people are  _talking_ to her again. Octavia Weasley had inclined her head graciously when Ginny smiled at her half-awkwardly before launching into a conversation about her Care of Magical Creatures assignment (Ginny had been been reminded so suddenly of Charlie that she’d had to stop walking in order to force air through her lungs). 

Riddle had glanced up, briefly, on that first day that she’d walked to breakfast with the Gryffindor girls, and she hadn’t imagined the slight narrowing of his gaze, but she’d beamed beatifically in his direction and carried on with life. 

Still; the most contact she has with the rest of her dorm is via McGonagall, and most of the conversations that she has with her revolve around Quidditch, but at least it’s a start. 

Ginny takes a long drink from her butterbeer and almost upends the rest over herself when she looks up to find Abraxas Malfoy looming over her. 

He huffs and plonks himself down beside her, taking a long swig from a silver flask before offering it to her. 

She wrinkles her nose and holds her cup out. 

Abraxas’s grin widens and he sloshes a couple of fingers of liquor into her butterbeer. 

“Bottoms up,” he dares, and they both steel themselves and throw their liquor back. 

Ginny blinks back tears furiously as the whisky burns a trail down her throat and doesn’t look back at him until she’s got herself under control. 

He’s already eyeing her in amusement, a second flask open in his hand. She shakes her head when he holds it up, and he shrugs and takes a gulp. 

“You really shouldn’t be with me,” she tells him dourly when he’s done. 

Abraxas chuckles and caps his flask sloppily. “I’ll just say that I saw a  _very_  pretty girl sitting  _all_  alone, and decided to join her.” His smirk is bright and sly in the flickering light of the fires. “It might even be true.” 

Ginny blinks, sits up, and blinks again. 

“You’re  _flirting_ with me,” she accuses, and he laughs in her face. 

“Well, it’s true that I saw you alone and didn’t want you to be,” he admits, and squints up at the moon. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but sitting on the sidelines of festivals kind of defeats the purpose of going to them.” 

Ginny rolls her eyes. “Riddle’s going to know that you’re here,” she points out, cognisant of the way Thanatos Nott is keeping a careful watch on their corner of the grounds. 

“As he should,” Abraxas agrees, “because he also told me to keep an eye on you.” 

She fights down the nausea that rises in her throat, and her discomfort must show on her face because Abraxas tactfully directs an aguamenti into her empty cup. 

“That’s usually not the reaction that most people have to Riddle,” he observes. Ginny shudders. 

“You know exactly why I have that reaction to Riddle,” she retorts, and he rubs at his chest absently. “I don’t like all this dancing around; I keep thinking that he’s going to leap out at me randomly and torture me into madness, Vow notwithstanding.” 

“He’s trying to figure out how you fit into his plans,” Abraxas says, scraping his hair back into a knot. “He doesn’t know how to use you yet, so he’s hanging back until he does. Don’t worry; he can’t risk alienating you. I heard the terms of the vow. You need to be at least halfway cooperative, and you can’t exactly do that whilst expelling your entrails onto the dungeon floors.” 

Ginny makes a noncommittal sound in her throat. 

“But if you don’t mind me asking,” Abraxas continues as he charms his hair into place, “What’s  _your_ end game with Riddle? I mean, you’re clearly in Dumbledore’s camp, and it’s been obvious since Day One that Dumbledore would like nothing more than to have Riddle stripped of his magic or dead - whichever is easiest.” 

Ginny keeps silent - because it’s  _true_ , isn’t it? Dumbledore had seen her memories and he wants a fifteen year old boy dead. She has a feeling that he’s only holding back because of some residual shame, but she knows that  _something_ changes in Riddle between this year and the next, and once that happens, he will  _have_ to be eliminated. 

“I have two possible goals,” Ginny says eventually, and her eyes follow McGonagall as she sways back and forth on her feet, deep in debate with a bigger gaggle of students (no doubt about the principles of transfiguration and more fire magic), but she only sees her professor, old and tired and furious, duelling Bellatrix Black over the bodies of her dead students. “Either Tom Riddle grows a conscience, and I don’t have to assassinate a child, or Tom Riddle becomes an unfortunate casualty in the Muggles’ war.” 

Abraxas sucks in a breath. “He promises to make the wizarding world pure again,” he murmurs. “No more dilution of our deepest traditions by Muggle foolery.” 

Ginny’s laugh comes out like a harsh bark. “And what are you doing now, Abraxas, scion of the Malfoys? You’re dressed like a magical monster, drinking firewhisky, at Samhain. Is this how the ancient wizards celebrated the coming of the dark months? By getting raucously drunk?” 

Abraxas shifts uncomfortably. “Well, they  _did_  do the mummery.” 

She snorts and takes a sip of the water in her cup. Her stale, lukewarm, magical water. “Riddle wants  _power_ ,” she says bluntly, “and he’s clever enough to parrot what his potential backers think are important. Or, rather, the  _parents_ of his potential backers.” 

Abraxas uncaps his flask and takes another extremely protracted swig. Ginny holds her hand out, and he passes it over to her wordlessly. 

“I know  _that_ ,” he says finally, as she sips cautiously. “But don’t we all want some measure of power? Ambition isn’t something that I can fault him for when it’s a tenet of our House. It’s a desirable quality in human  _nature_.” 

“There’s a difference in wanting to rule the world and being prepared to murder every third person in it in order to rule over a wasteland. The first is ambition. The second is insanity.” 

They sit in silence for a while, passing the firewhisky back and forth, before Abraxas clears his throat. 

“So, what are you supposed to be dressed as, anyways?” He picks at a black feather that had become dislodged in her hair, and gently slots it back into place. 

The bonfires are burning steadily, bathing the grounds in blood-red light. Ginny answers, but the words come from very far away - and it’s not the Hogwarts in front of her in this time that she is seeing. 

“The Morrigan,” she replies. “I’m the Morrigan.” 

 


	13. Chapter 13

_2 November 1942_

It’s about eight in the morning, so Ginny reckons that she can be forgiven for managing to headbutt McGonagall in the back when they’re both climbing out of the portrait hole for breakfast - and it wouldn’t have happened if McGonagall had pulled up short without her noticing. 

Both girls tumble out onto the floor in a tangle of bookbags and legs, and it is only when Ginny gingerly extricates her head from under McGonagall’s left knee that a hand cuts into her view. 

A graceful, long-fingered hand. 

Ginny shuts her eyes and tries to count to ten very slowly, but McGonagall shoves her off her chest -  _Merlin and Morgana, maybe you should lay off the treacle tart -_ and the hand reaches out to grab her by the elbow to stop her from falling over. 

Ginny’s prepared for the self-loathing that sweeps through her right along the heat from his touch, but it hits her like a freight train anyways. 

It was easier to ignore the physical chemistry between them when he was keeping an actual physical distance, but it’s hard to deny it when he’s close enough for her to smell his aftershave. 

And then she remembers those fingers reaching up, up, and out of the pages of a diary she’d poured her innocence into, and she swallows hard against the bile rising in her throat.

She looks up to find both Riddle and McGonagall staring at her - the former in polite amusement, and the latter with a suddenly tense jaw that relaxes in degrees as the awkwardness stretches on. 

“I’ll save you some tea, Jones,” McGonagall says finally, and twitches a smile in Riddle’s direction before jogging off. 

Ginny makes to call after her -  _please please please please don’t leave me alone - please don’t leave me alone with him_  - but Riddle’s grip tightens very slightly, the pads of his fingers rubbing against her bones, and she closes her mouth. 

She pulls away from him - and is surprised when he lets her shift away - and stands slowly, smoothing her skirt down and hefting her book bag a little higher on her shoulder. Riddle holds his hand out again, a clear invitation to carry her things for her, but she ignores it and starts ploughing down the corridor, determinedly pretending that the teenaged dark lord hadn’t been waiting outside her dormitory for her to walk her to breakfast. 

Her rejections don’t seem to faze him, however, because he just shrugs and keeps pace with her, hands tucked idly into his pockets. 

“Nott tells me that you and Malfoy were chatting like old friends on Hallowe’en,” he says casually, and Ginny resists the urge to find Abraxas right then and there and punch his nose in for being careless. 

(Or wasted. 

She’s pretty sure that he’d been cleverly hiding intoxication under an anti-slurring charm throughout their conversation.) 

Ginny peeks at him from the corner of her eye, and sees nothing but calculated interest until she catches the tick in his jaw when he directs a glance at the juncture where her neck slips into her collar. 

So he’s playing  _that_ card. 

“He’s very handsome,” she simpers, and laughs at the fleeting look of disdain on his face. “He was there on  _your_ orders, as you very well know. I don’t see why you didn’t just go down to the festival yourself if having me in your periphery is so important to you.” 

Riddle shrugs. “The Samhain rituals lack true power. I don’t see a point in paying lip service to dead customs just to use them as an excuse to get appallingly drunk.” 

“You could have gone and  _socialised_. It could have been  _you_ plying me with liquor instead of Abraxas.” 

Riddle’s eyes narrow. “ _Abraxas_?” 

She bats her eyelashes at him, but doesn’t reply. 

“I could always torture Malfoy into telling me how you two managed to get so friendly in the two hours I have my back turned,” he says conversationally, and Ginny doesn’t skip a beat. 

“You won’t have to,” she snorts, and tightens her grip on her schoolbag as the image of Abraxas’s ugly, puckered scar flashes through her mind. “It’s called  _making friends_ , Riddle. You might want to try it sometime.” 

She’s also completely not serious, because she, better than most people, is aware that Tom Riddle doesn’t  _have_ friends. At least, the Tom that Riddle will be in a year’s time will be emotionally  _incapable_  of having friends. 

As it is, Riddle quirks a corner of his lips upwards. “I am quite certain that McGonagall just left us both alone so that I could talk to you uninterrupted. I would consider that a friendly gesture to  _me_.” 

 _That’s because McGonagall doesn’t know that you’re a couple of decades short of being a mass murderer_ , Ginny is tempted to say, but settles for: “Let me show you something.” 

Riddle’s expression takes on a hungry, predatory cast as she snags a hand around his wrist and yanks him into an alcove. In one fluid movement, he’s got his wand pointed up at her temples, and Ginny meshes her fingers into his own and whispers  _Legilimens_.   

_Red eyes. Snakelike features. Chalky skin. Cold, cold whispers in the light of the morning, and cruel, heedless brutality._

Riddle recoils, shoving against the boundaries of the memory and hissing when his blood grows hot against the constraints of the Vow. 

Ginny breaks away. Riddle drops his wand and stumbles back, flushed and feverish. “You  _tricked_ me,” he gasps, and she shakes her head. 

“You  _wanted_  to  _look_. But all you need to know is this: you didn’t have  _friends_ , Tom Riddle.” She’s panting slightly, and trying very hard not to shake. “You ate yourself up from the inside out.” 

He scrubs at his skin as his body temperature cools, calmed by the rapid abandonment of the action that would have broken his oath. “But that’s why you’re  _here_ , isn’t it? You don’t want that world any more than I do.” 

Ginny registers the wildness in his eyes, and recognises fear, pure and young, before he shutters it away. 

 _If the monster existed, it was buried deep_. 

Or it hasn’t yet been born. 

She picks his wand up from the floor, rolling it between her fingers. It’s hot to the touch, and she drops it into his waiting palm in relief. 

“Don’t torture Abraxas,” she advises. “Don’t torture  _anybody_.” 

She sweeps out of the alcove and quickens her pace. 

If McGonagall thinks it odd that she’d left Ginny and Riddle together only to see Ginny come in alone, she doesn’t say anything. 

Riddle enters the Great Hall when she’s in the midst of buttering her toast. He doesn’t deign to look in her direction as he takes his place at the Slytherin table, but she feels the pressure of his awareness like a weight against her chest. 

Abraxas, seated at Riddle’s right hand, risks a worried glance up at her when Riddle turns aside to pour himself some juice. 

_I could always torture Malfoy._

Ginny’s knife slips in her hand and scores a red line across her thumb. 

She puts it hastily down and busies herself with hunting for the marmalade. 

McGonagall, who has witnessed this entire exchange, wisely holds her tongue and hands her a napkin. 

 


	14. Chapter 14

_5 November 1942_

Esther Bones throws her quill dramatically aside and buries her head in her hands. 

(McGonagall’s lips thin and Ginny and Octavia exchange a furtive look of exasperation.)

“I  _can’t_ ; I don’t  _understand_ what Dumbledore wants us to do - what is this  _restructuring nature_ project, anyhow; it’s not like they’ll  _test us_ this in the OWLs -” 

“It’s for  _bonus points_ ,” Ginny interrupts. “But I quite understand if you’re just worried about getting  _points_ ,” she continues under her breath, and Octavia sniggers before she can stop herself. 

(Ginny feels like every laugh that she scores out of Octavia is an achievement - she’s the quietest of the lot of McGongall’s Gryffindor clique - but she  _knows_ that the best friend of  _Cedrella Black_ would  _have_  to have a sense of humour. 

Then again, her grandmother had once switched Fred’s and George’s jumpers when they were babies and getting them mixed up had been a legitimate concern -  _just for kicks._ Molly Weasley had apparently not found it to be a particularly funny prank.) 

Esther turns on her indignantly. “Well, it’s not like  _you_ have to worry about  _exams_  -  _Tom Riddle_ is walking you to breakfast, so you might as well sit back and marry him and your life will be  _set_ -” 

Ginny grimaces and shoves a book in her direction, carefully not looking at McGonagall. “We’re fifteen _._ Can we not talk about getting married at  _fifteen_? It’s the nineteen forties, not the dark ages.” 

Esther opens her mouth to respond, but McGonagall beats her to it. “Maybe if we put more energy into our work than we did on speaking in italics, we could see a little progress.” If her voice is sharper than usual, no one comments on it. “I have twenty minutes before Jones and I have to get to Quidditch - what’re you having problems with?” 

Esther jabs a finger at a string of figures in her Transfiguration textbook and sits back whilst McGonagall sighs deeply and grabs the dictionary that Ginny had offered. “Most spells are rooted in Latin - it’s one of the oldest languages, and has extremely close ties with the nature of  _things_. The way we practice magic now is linked to the expression of thought in  _words_. So if you’re trying to transfigure one object into another, you need to call to the closest nature of the subject, and then describe what you want it to do.” 

Ginny doesn’t need to look up from her work to know that Esther Bones’s eyes have glazed over. 

McGonagall casts her own up to the heavens, looking for inspiration. “Alright - take that stone statue over there. If I wanted it to move, I can’t just translate  _rock, move!_ into Latin, because it’s not  _just_  a  _rock_. I’d probably use a name - because it’s sculpted into the shape of a man - and then ask it to move.” 

“You could put a treacle tart on the other end of the hallway and shout  _Quidditch_ ,” Octavia suggests. 

McGonagall clearly suppresses a chuckle, and carries on. “So - um -  _Peter_ is a name that means  _Rock -_  that’s ancient Greek - and I can join it with an existing command spell that we use for movement - like  _locomotor._  I’d probably have to tweak the translation of  _Peter_ to fit with  _locomotor_  - just so it rolls off the tongue better, but off the top of my head, the spell would probably be - um -  _Piertotum Locomotor_.” 

Esther purses her lips. “How do you even know that that spell will  _work_?” 

Ginny, whose life had been saved by a suit of armour shoving her to the ground and taking an Avada Kedavra in her place, shakes her head to clear it of memories of dust and rubble. “I’m sure it works,” she says quietly. 

McGonagall looks rather pleased with herself - as well as slightly stunned at her own brilliance - and turns back to her own essay whilst Esther huffs and picks her quill up again, scowling at the Latin dictionary.  

She’s just got it cracked open when Abraxas Malfoy saunters up to their table, suave and debonair, with his hands in the pockets of his robes. 

“Ladies,” he begins, and she slams it shut again whilst flipping her hair over her shoulder. 

Ginny has a terrible feeling about this. 

Abraxas grins at Esther good-naturedly before turning away from her rapidly. 

“I was wondering if I could speak to you for a moment, Miss Jones.” He’s smiling, but Ginny’s heart sinks when she notes the way his bicep twitches involuntarily. She recognises that. 

She stands hastily, almost upsetting the inkwell she’d been sharing with Octavia and firmly ignoring the wide-eyed look of incredulity that Esther Bones is levelling at her. 

“We have Quidditch in a bit,” McGonagall protests, but Ginny waves a hand in her direction benignly.

"It’ll only be a minute,” she says, but she’s already walking away from the table, with Abraxas following at a gentlemanly pace. 

That is, until she rounds a corner near the back of the library and he’s suddenly in her face, shoving her back against the bookshelf with an arm shaking with the aftershocks of the Cruciatus. 

“What did you  _tell_ him?” Abraxas spits, and she knows it isn’t vicious malice that propels him - not when she can see the dilation of his pupils and the tremor in his hold. 

“I told him not to torture you - advice which he has  _obviously_ taken lightly. What did he  _do_?”  

Abraxas keeps her there for a moment more, searching her expression, before letting her go. He backs away tiredly, sagging against the shelf opposite her, and scrubs a palm across his face. “The Cruciatus, of course - some legilimency - but he didn’t get past me offering you firewhisky.” He looks up at her bleakly. “You were supposed to teach me how to be  _stronger_. I don’t see how teaching me how to punch is going to protect me from a boy with a wand and no soul.” 

Ginny wants to correct him - he’s being figurative, and there’s no  _way_ that Abraxas Malfoy knows about horcruxes yet - but she just leans forward and lays a palm over his chest - over his scar. “You Malfoys are a slippery lot,” she observes, and she feels the shift of muscle as he suppresses another aftershock. “When you steel yourself - whether to take a hit or to deliver a blow - you’re standing your ground. Riddle needs you - he needs you alive and sane and willing to back him up, so he’s holding back.” Malfoy jerks back, but she presses harder. “I know it doesn’t feel like it, but there will come a time when he will truly enjoy hurting people - you included - for the thrill of it. I know a girl who lied under torture - she didn’t just block legilimency after a couple of rounds of Crucio - she lied  _through_ it. Think of it not just as physical training. Think of it as learning how to stand for things that you know you should be standing for.” 

Because she’s so close to him, she feels Abraxas’s heart rate pick up when she looks him square in the eyes. 

Suddenly embarrassed, she looks away. “That, and Riddle never expects a physical attack,” she continues lightly. “You’re bigger than he is. If it ever gets really bad, you could just wrestle him to the ground and break his wand. You just have to get past the psychological barrier of not hurting him.” 

She glances up at him then, and isn’t sure what to make of the way he’s staring at her. 

He clears his throat. “Um. Ginevra-” 

“ _Jones.”_

McGonagall’s voice reaches them before she does (which is what she probably intends), and by the time she pokes her head around to their section, they’re on opposite sides of the aisle again, staring resolutely at the floor. 

At least, Ginny’s staring resolutely at the floor. She has no idea of where Abraxas is looking, but McGonagall’s voice takes on an amused lilt when she asks, “Ready to go?” 

Ginny pushes away from the shelf and straightens her robes. “Of course.” She drops Abraxas a quick nod before leaving, and keeps her attention focused on the back of McGonagall’s head. 

“So  _that’s_ why you aren’t interested in Tom,” McGonagall murmurs, and Ginny, who’s wondering how to broach the subject of  _not hurting Abraxas_ again in a way that won’t make it seem like Abraxas is running to her after getting tortured (even though it’s true), almost walks into another bookshelf. 

“ _What_?” 

“You and Malfoy,” McGonagall clarifies, and smirks. “He’s really quite handsome - and very wealthy. Esther would claw her eyeballs out in jealousy.” 

Ginny swallows the laugh that bubbles up in her throat. “Yes,” she says solemnly. “Esther would.” 

How does one explain trying to keep a future Death Eater’s father safe from his evil overlord? 

One doesn’t. 

Ginny shoves the image of the blue heat of Abraxas’s eyes out of her head as they return to their table. 

McGonagall is still smirking at her conspiratorially. Ginny smirks back, and prays that it doesn’t look too forced. 

 


	15. Chapter 15

_6 November 1942_

Riddle  _had_ been walking her to breakfast every day that week, but they’d done the journey in silence - she in resignation at his attention, and he in tense, observant wrath at her continued refusal to discuss the future with him (barring glimpses that he really would have rather avoided seeing).

Thus, it comes as a surprise to him, she notes with satisfaction, that she preludes their daily walk with a slap.

“Buggering  _Christ_ ,” he gasps, the slightest cockney accent colouring his voice as he staggers back. No one is around to see, because McGonagall and the other girls tend to see him, giggle, and hurry off in the name of  _giving the lovebirds privacy_ , but he still looks around frantically before dropping his hand from his cheek. 

“I’m  _sorry_ ,” she intones, tucking her hand back into her robes to hide how the slap had stung  _her_ palm, as well. “Did that  _hurt_?” 

His cheek is bright red, and he looks  _murderous_. “What on  _earth_ was that for?”

“Bet it didn’t hurt more than the  _Cruciatus_ ,” she sneers, and starts walking - but with her wand in hand, because it’s really not a great idea to keep one’s back to Tom Riddle in an empty hallway after hauling back and hitting him in the face.

And he is, as per usual, completely predictable.

She sidesteps the jet of red light that comes her way and levels a body-bind at him (which grazes his robes as he jumps out of the way). A portrait is shouting about  _no magic in the hallways, delinquents_ , but her blood is pounding in her ears and her nerves are alive -  _alive_  - and  _god; this_  was the feeling she’d been trying to recapture with Quidditch.

She wonders, briefly, how different her life would have been if she hadn’t sucked war into her bones at age eleven.

But she needn’t have worried; Riddle is on the ground, convulsing, and she remembers their Vow.

She pads her way back over to him calmly and sinks to her knees. “I’m unharmed,” she informs him unnecessarily as the blood recedes from his face and he swipes sweat from his forehead with a shaking hand.

He sits up, glaring at her as he looses his tie. “Abraxas told you.”

She shrugs. “I recognised the symptoms."

His eyes narrow to slits, and he looks more serpentine than she’s ever seen him in this incarnation. “I’m tired of our games, Ginevra. You will tell me what  _happened_  to me.”

She stares at him, long and hard, before conjuring a handkerchief out of thin air and handing it to him. “You carried on exactly as you are now,” she says. “You tortured, you killed, you consumed.”

“So does  _Grindelwald_ ,” he points out, “and he doesn’t look like some sort of monster from nightmares.”  _He looks quite nice, actually_ , hangs unsaid between them, and Ginny has to agree (albeit privately), because she’s seen the pictures in the Daily Prophet - they’ve all seen the pictures in the Daily Prophet - of Grindelwald waving merrily from the killing fields of Eastern Europe.

Sometimes, Ginny forgets that in this time, other people are at war, too.

Riddle is still looking up at her, politely desperate for answers, and so she makes a snap decision. Dumbledore had warned her about revealing too much, but she decides to take the gamble anyways.

“You lost your humanity,” she says, and barrels on as he rolls his eyes. “You picked apart at your soul.” 

He purses his lips thoughtfully when it’s clear that she isn’t just being metaphorical. “Why would I do that?”

She looks back at him, trying to keep her expression serene. “You know why.”

And he does, because his eyes flash red and his expression hardens. “You seem to know a lot of my secrets, Ginevra. Keep in mind that that doesn’t mean that you know  _me_.” 

She’s pretty sure it does, but she only smiles blandly in response. Her heart is  _still_ going faster than a niffler with sight of a necklace. She isn’t certain as to whether it’s still adrenaline from being attacked or whether it’s a chemical response to his cheekbones, gravity, and fucking  _ambition_. She doesn’t care to analyse it further at this point in time, though, so she just gets to her feet and holds a hand out. 

Waiting. 

Riddle looks at it, long and measured, before sliding his hand into hers and letting her help him to his feet. 

He stands head and shoulders above her, and at this proximity, she has to crane her neck to look up into his face. “I know a lot more about you than I wish I did,” she admits, looking at him and seeing an older boy - a crueller boy - a sliver of a soul who’d reached into her consciousness and  _taken_. He’d cradled her close and leeched the sunlight from her mornings and sucked the vivacity from her marrow. 

This Riddle has probably never been this close to a girl before, though, because he looks faintly uncomfortable, but simultaneously hungry; she recognises that look - she’s seen it in Michael, in Dean, and in  _Harry._ And she’s intrigued enough not to pull away when he reaches out, hesitantly, and tucks a loose lock of hair behind her ear. 

His fingertips brush against her pulse point and she forgets to breathe. 

He leans forward, lips soft against her ear. “Malfoy did this,” he whispers, breath hot against her cheek. “Were you thinking about me when he pressed against your body?” 

Ginny flinches away as if burned, and he rocks back on his heels, clearly pleased with himself for scoring a point - to what end, she doesn’t know, but the look on his face makes her want to drive her elbow into his nose. 

Instead, she lifts her chin and smiles, bold and Gryffindor-bright. “Were you imagining yourself in the place of Abraxas when Nott fed you that memory?” 

A muscle in Riddle’s jaw ticks at her use of Abraxas’s given name, and her smile widens into a beam. It’s nice to know that however evil Dark Lords may be, this one is  _still_ fifteen - almost sixteen, actually - and hormonal. “And just think,” she purrs, taking another step away and lifting her shoulder. “He got to sit with me for a full half hour without me thinking of maiming him even  _once_.” 

“That sounds  _boring_ ,” Riddle retorts, squaring his shoulders and closing the gap between them.

She shrugs, and starts walking in earnest. They really  _do_ have to get to breakfast before class. He falls into step beside her easily, but when she peers at him from the corner of her eye, she’s taken aback by the sullen, wary set of his features. 

Harry had worn that expression during the latter half of her relationship with Dean Thomas. 

She wants to laugh. Tom  _Riddle_? Jealous of  _Malfoy_? 

 _But why wouldn’t he be?_ Something in her muses.  _Malfoy is wealthy, pureblooded, and has a family. In other words, he basically has everything that Riddle, the penniless, hungry orphan, wants_. 

How much of ourselves is shaped by nature, and how much else is warped by circumstance? 

Ginny pauses abruptly and curls a hand around his bicep. 

Riddle jerks to a stop, and looks back at her quizzically. 

“Abraxas and I - we’re not  _like_ that,” she clarifies, and notes the relief in his eyes before he walls it away. “And if you - if you  _wanted_  - then you have to start being  _normal_ instead of trying to hex me in contravention of the Vow. Or trying to use me like a crystal ball instead of a person.” 

“So, I should - bring you flowers?” His tone is light and casual, but she detects a hint of real concern in it. Maybe dating Michael Corner hadn’t been a complete waste of time after all - he’d also been as contrary as a kneazle in heat (which was why dating him had been especially trying towards the end, but he didn’t have Riddle’s charisma to make up for it). 

Still, the idea of Lord  _Voldemort_ bringing her flowers is hilarious, and she snickers before releasing him and moving on. “Maybe you could be yourself, sans the homicidal urges,” she suggests. “That would probably be new to you, but it may help to save you from yourself.” 

Riddle frowns. “What do you mean?” 

She tilts her head up to study him again. “If you grow a heart, Tom Riddle, you may starve the monster in you, yet.” 

He scoffs at that. “And are you supposed to be my salvation? Sent from the future to save me from my sins?” 

Ginny thinks about this for a moment before shaking her head. “No one is your salvation. If you’re responsible for your own sins, then you’re equally responsible for your  _own_  salvation.” 

He raises an eyebrow as they reach the Great Hall and shuffles forward half a step to hold the door open for her. “So what’re you  _doing_?” 

“Paving the way,” she replies. 

He doesn’t respond, but she feels the heat of him at her back as she sweeps through the entrance to the Great Hall. 

If she doesn’t think about the Tom Riddle of her own time, and doesn’t draw on her memories of the heat of the final battle or the cold of her first year, it feels quite nice to have him with her. 

Riddle smiles at her, and it’s unsure and shaky and - dare she think it’s _genuine_? 

When she turns towards her table after formally wishing him a good day ahead, she sees that Dumbledore is watching. 

She throws  _him_  a smile, too, and is slightly heartened by the fact that he doesn’t look as grave as he could.

 _This is progress_ , she thinks, hopefully.  _Maybe we won’t have to kill him after all._

Then she watches Dumbledore’s eyes slide towards the Slytherin table, and notes the way his grip grows white against the stem of his goblet. 

Riddle is but making innocuous conversation with Alphard Black. 

Unease curdles like old milk in the depths of Ginny’s gut. 

 


	16. (interlude)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm so sorry that I've made all of you wait forever - and just for an interlude, I know. The reason why I've been away for so long is because I began my pupilage at a law firm at the start of the year, and I haven't had the time to take enough of a breather from work to sit down and draft things that aren't affidavits or pleadings or opinions and the like. Rest assured, though: I WILL be finishing Left Hook. Thank you to all of you who've stuck by and given me shoutouts and opened thoughtful discussions on this fic; you are amazing. I hope that you all will understand that the frequency of updates will be dictated by the amount of free time that I have (which is, at the moment, admittedly depressingly little). In the meantime, please, please don't give up on Ginny, Tom, Abraxas, McGonagall and I. xxx

_7 November 1942_

Most people tend to have a pre-Quidditch ritual. Fred and George did illegal Honeydukes runs and hyped themselves up on chocolate and sugar quills. Charlie only ever wore his Antipodean Opaleye printed briefs. Angelina Johnson, Alicia Spinnet, and Katie Bell used to gather together in the Gryffindor common room and bellow the chorus to  _Come Out, Ye Black and Tan_. She isn’t sure what Oliver Wood did, but Fred swore that it involved abstinence from sexual gratification for at least three weeks leading up to a game and blood sacrifice at the dark of the moon. Ginny herself runs a hand through her hair and ties the strands that come away to one of the twigs, so that she will literally be  _one_ with the broom. 

McGonagall’s, it appears, involves sneaking out of their dorm in the dead of the night with her broomstick in one hand and a salt shaker in the other. 

Ginny wakes up simply because McGonagall shuffles her feet into her boots and - and Ginny has known  _war_ in the night. 

She waits ten minutes after McGonagall exits their dorm before throwing on a cloak, grabbing her wand, and slipping out after her. 

She doesn’t exactly know why she does it, but she lets her feet carry her after her sometime-acquaintance. 

And when she sidles out a side door and patters her way onto the pitch, she lifts her face to the sky and understands. 

McGonagall is standing, head bowed, in the middle of the pitch, lips moving in silent prayer - and as Ginny watches from the sidelines, she steps back, kicks off, and begins to salt the earth from fifty feet above the ground. 

The clouds are heavy in the sky and there’s barely enough moonlight for Ginny to make out McGonagall swooping weightlessly above the pitch, but for a moment, she’s caught up in the magic of the ritual - the way some magic is personal; the way that they all make their own miracles. 

Ginny watches McGonagall climb, and climb, and  _climb_ , and she recognises that grasping desperation to leave the earth. 

And she realises that she really doesn’t know  _anything_ about her apart from the fact that she is devoted in equal parts to both Quidditch and academic excellence. McGonagall isn’t just ambitious. She has something to  _prove_. It’s what drives her forward - it’s what drives them  _all_ forward. 

It hits her, then, why Riddle will always,  _always_ fail; he’s always hunting for the old ways - for the old roads back to magic born of a bloodier time. But magic is  _alive_  - and magic is  _owned_  - and magic, like time, always,  _always_ flows forwards. 

Lightning cracks the sky in half, and Ginny melts back into the shadows as McGonagall banks sharply and plummets towards the ground. 

By the time McGonagall ducks back into their dormitory, breathless and sweaty, Ginny is already tucked back into bed, hand on her wand under her pillow, listening to the thunder of power in her blood. 


	17. Chapter 17

_7 November 1942_

Ginny can’t remember the last time that she was actually  _nervous_ before a Quidditch match, but here she is, sitting on a bench and staring at the bright copper weave of a lock of her hair tied tight around her broom, praying that she’ll be enough to cement her worth to the team. McGonagall, on the other hand, appears calm and alert despite her midnight jaunt, and is friendly enough to give her shoulder an encouraging squeeze and proffer a toffee. 

“It’s normal to be a little anxious before a match,” she advises as sagely as fifteen year old can. “Just try to avoid the bludgers and ignore Diogenes Dearborn.” 

Ginny glances up, confused. “Why would I care about Diogenes Dearborn?” 

McGonagall rolls her eyes and kicks at a bench. “He’s the commentator and tends to  _always_ sound surprised whenever a woman scores. Dippet adores him.” 

Ginny is suddenly acutely aware that unlike in her own time, there aren’t separate locker rooms for men and women, and the only concession to her sex is a makeshift curtain partitioning one end of the changing room from the other. 

McGonagall grimaces. “It’s the muggleborns and a number of the halfbloods,” she explains. “Muggle women only got the right to vote fourteen years ago.”

She can distinctly hear Blishwick screaming at their Seeker, Fortescue, to please finish his good-luck wank and get some pants on. “ _That’s not what you’re supposed to be catching,”_ he shouts, and the male changing room erupts into sniggers. Ginny palms her face in her hands. 

“It wasn’t even funny,” she whispers, aghast, and McGonagall nods, expression pained. 

Johansson seems to feel the same way, because a series of sharp thwacks that sound like towels hitting flesh renders everyone silent, and is followed by a demand to huddle. 

McGonagall lifts her eyes to the ceiling and cracks her knuckles. “Time to win,” she says grimly, and offers Ginny a hand. 

Ginny looks up at McGonagall and notes the square set of her shoulders and the blazing determination in her face. “It’s time to win,” she agrees, and takes her offered hand. 

* * *

 

The Slytherins are a slippery bunch, but they play a more brutal game now than they did in her time (she hadn’t thought that it was possible; hadn’t realised how much Madam Hooch had fought to keep Quidditch at a varsity level appropriate for children zipping fifty feet above the ground on sticks of wood). 

She doesn’t really recognise any of the Slytherin players, but they all throw her a singular, sharp glance before kick-off. The significance behind it slams into her with the force of the bludgers that their beaters keep hitting  _around_ her about halfway through the game. She’d been suspicious when forty-five minutes had elapsed and she hadn’t had to make any sudden turns in order to avoid a skull fracture, and her suspicions are confirmed when she deliberately puts herself in the path of a bludger meant for Blishwick, only for a Slytherin beater to panic and race to bat it away. 

Ginny risks a scan of the Slytherin stands, but, as expected, she can’t pick out individuals from this high up. Quidditch does not seem to be Riddle’s thing, though, so he might have just sent proxies to keep an eye on the match for him, like he did at Samhain. 

Keep an eye on her for him. 

Keep her safe, like a possession, for him. 

Irritation flares, hot and prickly, in her gut, before it dissipates equally rapidly. She can use this. 

She banks a hard left and tackles the Slytherin chaser in possession of the quaffle at the material time, snags the quaffle from under his arm, and flips it over to McGonagall before he can snatch it back. One of the Slytherin beaters rears back to hit a bludger at her teammate, but Ginny weaves around three people and physically puts herself between him and McGonagall. The beater jerks and his hit goes wide, clipping the tailtwigs of his own seeker’s broom. He spins out - and it  _costs_ him, because Fortescue is plummeting like a stone towards a spark that glitters gold in the afternoon sun. 

Gryffindor  _roars_. 

There’s a blur of red and gold, and McGonagall pulls Ginny in for a hard, one-handed hug (one arm still tight around the quaffle) before releasing her in order to do a couple of celebratory backflips. 

Ginny pulls back, laughing - and the sudden, horrified intake of breath from the stands is the only warning she gets before the shrill whistle of a bludger cutting through the air is suddenly  _too close._

Instinct has her angling her broom down to  _dive_ , but she already knows that it’s too late to completely avoid it. 

She steels herself - 

\- and is only buffeted - albeit  _hard_  - by the shock of the bludger exploding in mid-air. 

Ginny leans into a couple of barrel rolls to slow herself down - and comes to a halt with Johansson swooping over to brace her on her left, McGonagall already holding her steady on her right. 

The stands are hushed, and all eyes are trained on the one boy in the Slytherin seats who had managed to blast an attacking bludger into  _nothing_  two seconds before impact. 

Breathing hard, Riddle slowly raises his wand into the air and  _casts_. 

An enormous black raven climbs into the sky, trailing a hissing green serpent that moves like a dragon. 

It’s garish, unsubtle, and quite ugly, because Tom Riddle is skilled at many things but is  _not_ artistic. Nevertheless, he makes his point. 

(Ginevra Jones had gone as the Morrigan to Samhain, with black feathers in her bright red hair.)

“He really can’t just bring you flowers, can he?” McGonagall murmurs wryly into her ear. 

Ginny is frozen, not least because she can hardly see how any of this is romantic _at all_ , especially since at least one member of the Slytherin Quidditch team is  _definitely_ getting tortured within the next two hours. 

Ginny looks at the smoky creatures drifting ominously above them in the clear blue sky, and tries to blot out the image of a snake and a skull cast high above the burning skeleton of her family’s home in the dark of the night.

But Riddle is staring straight at her, eyes dark and unwavering, and even at this distance, all she can see is  _him_. She can’t imagine how she’d missed him before. 

Her heart is going faster than a team of Abraxans at high wind, and it isn’t all just because of the adrenaline. 

 


	18. Chapter 18

_8 November 1942_

It’s a little past three in the morning when McGonagall finds Ginny curled up in a window seat in the common room, staring blankly out of the window. 

She hears the crunch of honeydukes wrappers under McGonagall’s feet and the clink of butterbeer bottles being moved out of the way, but doesn’t turn to her until the other girl settles into the other side of the seat and nudges her with a fluffy bedroom slipper. 

“Shouldn’t you be in bed?” 

McGonagall leans back. “Had a little too much butterbeer and had to use the loo. I realised you weren’t in the room when I came back.” 

Ginny purses her lips and tilts her head to rest against the window pane. “And did you come looking for me as a responsible prefect, or did you just want to come looking for me?” 

“Both.” McGonagall sucks her tongue off the roof of her mouth and taps a finger against the cold glass. “Who let the kneazle into your knickers? We won the game, you didn’t die, you got the boy, and Gryffindor partied for eight hours straight. There isn’t a reason for you to be sulking all by yourself in the middle of the night.” 

 _I’m from the future, I’m supposed to neutralise Tom Riddle before he becomes Lord Voldemort, I have no idea of how I’m supposed to do it now that he’s pretty much publicly announced that we’re a couple without consulting me about it beforehand; he kind of saved my life, though - and then proceeded to_ not _come and look for me after (it is likely that he was gleefully torturing the Slytherin Quidditch team in the dungeons). Separately: is the power of love truly redeeming, or is it just tacky?_

 _“_ You’re not a raging bitch to me any more,” is what Ginny eventually settles on after about forty seconds of contemplative silence. “Shouldn’t you be even more upset, now that the boy you like is clearly interested in someone else?”

McGonagall makes an impatient sound in her throat. “On the contrary,” she says, flatly, “it’s because he _isn’t interested in me_ that I’ve made a conscious decision to move on with my life. I’ve wasted so much time pining over someone who doesn’t want me. Why on _earth_ would I want to drag everyone into my own pit of misery just because a handsome boy doesn’t want to be my boyfriend?” 

Ginny blinks. _Oh. This_ is the McGonagall she’s familiar with. “And you had this epiphany-” 

“- Some time back, which is when I stopped being a _raging bitch_ , and actually started making an effort, which you have _clearly_ recognised.”

 _Oh._ Ginny blinks again, and opens her mouth to say something acknowledging and likely meaningless, but McGonagall barrels on.

“Actually - I thought that _you_ weren’t interested in him? I know you had _reasons_ for not wanting him, and you thought he was bad news - so what changed? I thought that you and Malfoy were seeing each other - don’t give me that _look_ , Jones, _rest assured_ , the _entire school_ is just as confused as I.” 

Ginny sits up rapidly. “Does the entire school _actually care_ who I’m stepping out with?” she demands, and McGonagall rolls her eyes so far back in her skull that she might well have sight of her brain. Ginny takes that as a solid _yes_ , and snorts in disgust. “Does no one have anything better to do with their time?” 

“You aren’t answering my question,” McGonagall points out, and Ginny lapses back into silence, because it _is_ a valid question - and she isn’t sure if she likes the answer that’s reverberating in the space between her ribs. 

McGonagall waits, dark gaze steady on her face. 

“Riddle - he’s not a _good person_ ,” she murmurs, and McGonagall’s eyebrows arch in response. “No - really. He hurts people; he hurts Abraxas, and I’m not sure if he’s doing it as a means to an end or if he really does enjoy making others suffer.” 

There’s a furrow in McGonagall’s forehead that Ginny knows will be settled permanently in about forty years. “Even if this is true, you knew this from the start,” she says slowly, eyes narrowing. “How?” 

Ginny keeps silent and considers McGonagall; she _wants_ to trust her; she _wants_ to tell her everything, like she would have told her professor in the future. 

(But, the Minerva McGonagall of now is not the Minerva McGonagall of the future.) 

Instead, she lifts her chin. “Abraxas needs friends,” she declares, and McGonagall hums doubtfully. “No, really. We should start our own study group. Not with the Gryffindor girls, and not Riddle’s. Abraxas will join us.” 

McGonagall’s expression switches from concerned to abruptly confused. “What is that going to achieve?” 

 _Give Abraxas a safety net so he’s more confident about standing up to Riddle_ , Ginny wants to say.  _Help me see the humanity that you see in Riddle._   _Help me believe it_. 

“Esther is an idiot and I know that Thanatos Nott creeps you out,” is what she says. 

McGonagall looks disbelieving but shrugs. “We’ve got that free period after lunch on Monday. Tell Abraxas that we’ll be in the library by the Divination stacks.” 

Ginny frowns. “Isn’t that in full sight of Riddle?” 

McGonagall tucks her robe more firmly around her person in preparation to go back to bed. “Isn’t that the point?” 

**Author's Note:**

> The best place to ask me anything is via tumblr. You can find me at elicitillicit.


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